I just got a call from my elder son, Scott, that he just raised his hand and joined the US Navy. It has taken him about 6 months to get all of his paperwork in order but he finally enlisted today as an Aviation Electronic, Electrical, and Computer Systems Technician.

He’s been going to school and managing a pizza place in Gainesville for awhile and finally decided that he wants more out of life. He’s been thinking about the military for quite awhile and perhaps it was some recent changes in his personal life and/or the fact that his little brother is doing so well in the Army that gave him that little nudge.

We are an Army family (me, wife, both dads, two uncles, etc) so it will take some time to get used to the Navy terminology. He’s in good company though as his great-grandfather (in the photo above) was in the Navy in WWII (earned 8 Bronze Stars in the Pacific — still alive!) and his great-great-grandfather went down with the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor.

He leaves for “A” school (basic training) in December at Great Lakes (near Chicago) and then his “C” school (advanced) in Pensacola. I think his entire training is roughly 8 months or so. He can also volunteer to be an aircrew technician which is physically demanding and somewhat hazardous (flight pay, rescue swimmer training, etc). I asked him if he was interested in that and his reply was, “Hell yea!!”.

I’m really proud of the kid guy and am so glad that he’s finally taken this step in his life. I think it’s going to give him a great future. I just need to find out where I can get a “Proud Navy Dad” bumper sticker to go along with my “Proud Army Dad” one.

Over the weekend I moved my blog from a shared server to a dedicated one. I apologize for anyone that tried to visit but found the site inaccessible. I’m starting to get 2K-3K page views a day and the shared server was starting suffer from performance issues.

I’m heading off to Costa Rica with my much better half for a long weekend. No kids, no computer and no work. If I’m not back by Tuesday then wait longer. I should return.

November is National Adoption month and I would strongly encourage anyone that has ever been thinking about adoption to seriously consider it.

My wife and I have been doing foster care for over 11 years (80+ kids to date) and never intended to adopt as we 3 bio kids. It’s funny how the right kid “finds” you. We got Kira straight out of the NICU with a ton of special needs as she was 3 1/2 months premature. With all of her physical problems she’s still our favorite (we joke with our bio kids that we love her more than them). Her adoption was final on September 12, 2008 and we plan to celebrate it each year.

For more info you can contact me or check out the Child Welfare Information Gateway website.

Remember, you don’t have to be perfect to be a perfect parent. Sometimes just showing up is a huge improvement in these kids’ lives.

A couple of people have asked me if I’m dead since my blog has been rather light for the last week or so. I actually have a full-time job and unfortunately that is getting in the way of my blogging.

Work at Appirio is quite busy as I just wrapped up one of the first rollouts of our new Professional Services Enterprise (PS Enterprise) product for a large Salesforce.com customer in Austin last week. We were replacing Open Air and working with a 1.0 release of PS Enterprise so things were new, fresh and exciting. I’m now on a new SFA project for one of the largest non-profits in the world based out of Washington, DC. We just finished a Google Apps conversion with them and now are implementing Salesforce CRM. We got a head-start on the project by using the Nonprofit Starter Pack.

Appirio is into full-swing Dreamforce mode and in addition to working at the two hands-on training sessions, I am getting ready for my own presentation, “Architecting in the Cloud: Choosing the Right Technologies for Your Solution” on Friday, Nov. 20 @ 11:30AM. My preso deck is almost done and we are just polishing up the slides with Dave Carroll.

I’m also putting the finishing touches on my book Beginning Java Google App Engine with my buddy Kyle Roche (BTW… Kyle is much smarter than I am and is the real brains behind the book). It looks like we are going to miss the Dreamforce release date but it will be available by Christmas. Hopefully we’ll have some propaganda to distribute at our booth during Dreamforce.

No, unfortunately I am not the Canadian actor named Jeff Douglas that starred in the Molson beer commercials.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRI-A3vakVg

My wife and I have been foster parents for over 11 years and have taken care of 75+ children for varying amounts of time. Roughly 5 years ago my wife quit her job and started doing full-time medical foster care. In addition to our own 3 biological children, at any point in time we could have 1-3 infants or toddlers with cerebral palsy, brittle bone disease, down syndrome, autism, feeding tubes, colostomy bags, prescription medications, etc. BTW, my wife is a saint and has the patience of Job.

As part of the foster case system, all of these children are covered under Medicaid. I want to state that my wife and I are both for medical insurance reform. We live with the medical system every day and see the massive amounts of problems. I’m not a doctor, economist or politician (God help me!), but parts of the reform bills in Congress, in my opinion, are not feasible. With all the debate regarding the “public option”, here are our experiences working daily with Medicaid.

Fewer Doctors – Over the past couple of years we have seen 2 of our favorite primary care physicians leave the Medicaid program. These are doctors that know our children, know us and that we trust. My wife spoke with their PAs and nurses and even though they love the kids and are committed to helping them, the “system” makes it unbearable. They complained about the low fees, late repayments and paperwork required for Medicaid. BTW, we are not seeing any new doctors entering the Medicaid system in our area.

Overcrowding & Longer Wait Times – Since there are fewer Medicaid doctors in our area, the ones that do accept Medicaid patients are becoming overcrowded and harder to get into. My wife routinely waits 1 1/2 – 4 hours in the waiting room before even seeing the Dr. or PA.

Increased Bureaucracy – My wife has to file her Medicaid claims on a weekly or biweekly basis. We’ve started to receive more requests for paper and more requirements for funding. There seems to be a “CYA” attitude with these requests. They may be trying to squeeze the fraud and waste from Medicaid but it translates directly to slower repayments and care for the children. If the government cannot even manage a small program like “cash for clunkers” how are they going to effectively service something that is 15%-20% of our economy?

Less Money – Eliminating waste and fraud is great but it relates directly to less services and benefits. We’ve seen the number of employees that man the Medicaid support lines decrease. My wife talks to the CSRs and they say there are fewer employees and that they are over worked. Many times if you cannot get to a CSR, we leave a message for a callback. We might not hear back from them for 3-5 days. When you need confirmation on paperwork or billings this can be a huge issue. Recently the Medicaid system switched from a VB6 program to an online system. My wife was so excited until she started using it. The website was essentially unusable for first 6-8 weeks. You couldn’t enter your claims, it crashed, gave cryptic error messages and drove my wife $&!@# crazy! I don’t know how many hours we both spent swearing, trying to use the website. And since the site didn’t work and people were not allowed to use the old VB6 program, the Medicaid phones were overloaded. We didn’t hear back from Medicaid for weeks!

Like I said, I’m not doctor or economist but I don’t see, based upon my experiences, that the public option would be anything but a disaster. How could lower fees to doctors resulting in few doctors and longer wait times be good? Also, with the influx of x million new patients who is going to treat them? We are not churning out that many new doctors. Again, overcrowding. I’m not sure exactly what need to be done to fix healthcare but a public option is not the answer.

Our family spent most of last week at Ft. Sill, OK as our youngest son graduated from Army Basic Training. Tyler has played soccer since age 5 and lifted weights in high school but we didn’t realize how physically fit he was. Out of his entire Battery (roughly 200 soldiers) he scored the highest on his PT test; 306 out of 300 possible points. He was promoted to E-2 and walked across the graduation stage second after the distinguished honor grad for the cycle. It was encouraging to see graduates from all 50 states plus Guam and Puerto Rico.

Tyler’s now at Ft. Bragg for AIT (37F – Psychological Operations Specialist) and then will probably stay there for SERE school, then head to Ft. Benning for Jump School and finally to Monterrey CA for language school for a year. He hopes to get Arabic.

It was nice being back on an Army post and I felt quite at home. I love the Army as race seems to matter much less than in the general population. You see whites, blacks, hispanics and asians working together and taking order from one another. It doesn’t matter what color they are just that they are all soldiers.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiFZ44E3Et4

After almost two year at Informa I’m leaving for an opportunity at Appirio that I cannot pass up. I’m looking forward to some exciting Salesforce.com projects at Appirio and hopefully I can even dabble in GAE/J and maybe even Google Wave. I’ll be heading to San Mateo for training the middle of July.

I was a little reluctant to leave Informa as the people are great and the work is very challenging. I’ve had the chance to work on some really cool projects:

1. Apex/Visualforce pilot when it originally rolled out
2. Sites pilot program
3. Ideas pilot program
4. Force.com Google App Engine for Java pilot
5. Global SSO rollout with Sxip and Ping Identity
6. Salesforce.com and SAP R/3 integration using the SAP Java Connector (JCo)
7. A ton of Apex and Visualforce!
8. Numerous Flex applications using the Force.com for AIR and Flex Toolkit and Adobe BlazeDS
9. .NET and Java applications support integrations and external functionality

If you are interested in a Salesforce.com developer position at Informa, please drop me a line and I can send you the job description.

Billy Marcus & Tyler Douglas

My son, Tyler, leaves for the Army in a couple of months so I decided to take him down to Texas to see his great grandparents. He hadn’t seen them since he was quite small and his great grandmother’s health is getting a little shaky.

My grandfather is a WWII Veteran and has 8 Bronze Stars while serving on the USS DuPage (1942-1945). He and Tyler hit it off quickly. We talked about politics, current events, old war stories and guns. Mostly guns. My grandfather was a avid target shooter after WWII and competed regularly for about 20 years. Tyler is just facinated with guns and their craftsmanship and we shoot nearly every weekend with our pistols (.22 & .32) and Ruger mini-14. My grandfather is getting up in age and doesn’t shoot as often as he’d like to so we took a couple of his guns and headed to the range. We had a great time and Tyler and he spent a hour or so cleaning his weapons together when we got back. Talk about quality time!

My grandfather has a lot of guns but is no longer able to shoot much. Since Tyler is essentially the only one in the family that shares his passion, my grandfather gave him his Kimber .45 ACP as a present. You wouldn’t believe how excited Tyler was!! We shipped it down and it should arrive so that we can head out to the range this weekend. Now I’ll have to take a loan out to buy enough ammo for him.

We left after a couple of days but hopefully we see them again soon. I told my grandparents that I’d fly them to Tyler’s Basic Training graduation in mid-August. Hopefully their health holds up.