I knew Bill early in my career while he was at Rice when Sesquinet was starting up. I worked for Sesquinet’s first customer, Baylor College of Medicine, at the time, and worked him often as that effort was started.
I offer condolences to his loved ones. I will always remember him fondly.
On Sun, Jan 26, 2020 at 6:54 AM Bob Hinden <bob.hinden@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Rod,
Thanks for the very nice note about Bill. I too will miss him.
Please express my condolences to Julie and the rest of his family.
Bob
> On Jan 25, 2020, at 8:34 PM, Rodney Van Meter <rdv=40sfc.wide.ad.jp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> This morning I talked to Julie Manning, Bill's wife. Bill died early
> Saturday morning, at home in Oregon. Most of you know Bill was
> waiting for a new heart. He would perhaps have gotten one next
> month. I guess the old one just wouldn't hold out long enough.
>
> I first met Bill in about 1995, when I returned to ISI after my first
> stint in Japan. He had taken a position in the Los Nettos project at
> ISI, a regional network project in the days when Internet service and
> operations work was still heavily shared between business and
> academia. Bill brought an operator's eye to the project, often seeing
> things differently from the researchers in the group.
>
> Bill kept the most erratic hours of any non-student I've ever met. He
> might be in the office at 2am or at 2pm, either was equally likely.
> I'd ask, "Bill, what time did you come in?" He'd reply, "10am." "I
> was here before that, and you were already here, it must have been
> earlier." "Greenwich Mean Time."
>
> And in one phase of life, "Bill, where do you live?" "Seat 4A." He
> would speculate about his average altitude and speed over the previous
> month.
>
> And, like any good geek, Bill had a spectacular collection of tie-dye
> t-shirts. He came by the look honestly: growing up in the Bay Area,
> he had actually snuck into Grateful Dead rehearsals held in a barn,
> and had traveled as a deadhead for a while.
>
> At ISI, we called Bill "the bad idea fairy". He always brought a
> slightly-off-kilter view of technical problems, which triggered
> endless discussions of fascinating, if usually implausible,
> alternatives.
>
> He had the most broad-ranging musical tastes of anyone I knew, and
> would eat almost anything (though, like me, he didn't drink alcohol).
> I was often envious of his eating and musical experiences. He
> certainly lived life to its fullest.
>
> On one occasion, I recall, we were eating lunch in a Thai restaurant
> for the first time. Bill called for the food "the way you'd make it
> in Thailand". The waiter went back into the kitchen and came out with
> a few raw Thai chiles. Bill ate one whole, without even breaking a
> sweat. The owner of the restaurant immediately came out to see who
> was eating them. Pam became a friend to our group.
>
> On other occasions, when the waiter asked for his order, Bill would
> point to another person at the table, and say, "I'll have what she's
> having." "Well, what is she having?" "I don't know, I haven't heard
> her say." Once in a while, he would point to someone else in the
> restaurant and say, "I'll have what they are having." It was funny
> and sometimes disconcerting, which was very Bill, and it was also his
> way of making sure he himself was eating (and thinking and doing) as
> broadly as possible, without getting stale.
>
> Bill worked in a bakery before joining Texas Instruments and
> accidentally falling into computer networking. (When we first met, he
> was commuting between Houston and L.A.; Julie and the kids were still
> in Houston.) I believe he attended a series of colleges but never
> finished his bachelor's degree. Just a few years ago, however, Jun
> Murai convinced him to get a Ph.D.; this took clearing administrative
> hoops to demonstrate that Bill's life experience matched that of a
> bachelor's degree, which it certainly did. I was honored to be on his
> Ph.D. committee. I literally created a "trouble ticket" accounting
> scheme to track change requests for his thesis.
>
> Bill was a valued member of the WIDE Project here in Japan. He worked
> with the DNS root operations group here, and participated in as many
> WIDE meetings as he could. He also came to Keio University's Shonan
> Fujisawa Campus when he was in Japan, and one of the best things about
> Bill was how seriously he took the students and their work, treating
> them like adult colleagues.
>
> Bill had friends on all seven continents, and for all I know on the
> International Space Station, as well. He was loved by us all.
>
> Julie does not plan to have a funeral immediately, so there is no need
> for flowers or the like. The family may do a memorial service in Utah
> in the spring.
>
> He was a unique and wonderful human being. And a good friend.
> Rest in peace, Bill.
>
> —Rod
>
> Rodney Van Meter
> Professor, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies
> Keio University, Japan
> rdv@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
>
>
>> On Jan 26, 2020, at 13:06, Jorge Amodio <jmamodio@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>>
>> So sad :-(
>>
>> On Sat, Jan 25, 2020 at 9:12 PM Randy Bush <randy@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>> we have lost another one
>>
>
