William J. Watson

Internet mail: watson@austx.tandem.com
Phone: (512) 452-1181
Address: PO Box 650106, Austin, TX, 78765-0106

Greetings!

At present, this page provides little more than links to a few of my favorite pasttimes and activities, with a few hints about my employment history and background. Eventually, I hope to set up some additional pages for each, and provide better links. This will have to do for now...

Activities

You can check out The Austin Chronicle for more information about the goings-on hereabouts than I could possibly provide. Unlike me, they actually update their listings regularly!

Dancing

I spend far too much time dancing for my own good, both here in Austin and elsewhere around the country. (The Northwest Folklife Festival is a really amazing event! Check it out!)

I'm a member of the board of the Austin 3rd Friday Contra Dance,
and a regular member of the
Houston Area Traditional Dance Society,
North Texas Traditional Dance Society,
Austin International Folk Dancers,
Texas International Folk Dancers, and
Country Song and Dance Society

I maintain(ed) a few WWW pages as resources for contra dance callers and organizers. I haven't touched these in quite some while, but here they are:

Books
A listing of contra dance publications, which will eventually include tables of contents, availability, etc.
Titles
An index of contra dance titles, providing links to the books where the dances were published.
Talent
A contact list for contra musicians, bands, and callers in Texas.
Notes for Cup Dancing
A way to bemuse, befuddle, and amaze passers-by.

Live Music

Austin has so many good bands, and receives visits from so many others, that good live music is often available in several venues almost every day of the week. I enjoy the music of many bands, but don't make my way out to see & hear them as often as I might. I've probably seen The Austin Lounge Lizards and Brave Combo more than any others, (except for the ones who play for contra dances). A good place to go for live music is The Cactus Cafe at UT's Texas Union. They have a good sound system, bring in good musical talent, and, as part of a state building, they prohibit smoking!

I'm president of the Austin Friends of Traditional Music.

Dining

I also enjoy eating out at some of the interesting dining spots around town, though I haven't had as many opportunities to do so as I would have liked of late. (I created a listing of my favorites back in about 1993, but haven't managed to update it in quite some time.) (This was also the very first HTML I created, so it's a bit creaky.)

Cooking

I like to cook, but don't do it nearly as often as I'd like. Thus, I mostly end up cooking familiar favorites, rather than doing much experimentation. Here are a few of my recipes. I'll type up more Real Soon Now.

Outdoors

I enjoy many different outdoor activities, including canoeing (white-water, when I can find it), camping, hiking, and bicycling quiet backroads. I even made up a Bandana Map to help folks navigate the rapids on the Guadalupe River. You can check the flow rate from Canyon Dam to see what the conditions are like. (350 CFS is a minimum for canoeing, 850 CFS is much more fun!)

My sister and I hiked up to the summit of Mt. Whitney the summer of 1998 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of a trip from Pasadena taken by our great-grandfather, two of his brothers, and their father. Our grandfather climbed Mt. Whitney, too.

I'm a member of the Austin Cycling Association, the Texas Bicycle Coalition, and the Sierra Club's Austin regional group, in the Lone Star Chapter. (My parents and grandparents were also Sierra Club members.)

What do I do for a living?

I work for Compaq Computer Corporation's Tandem Division in an architecture and ASIC design group on ServerNet projects. I have duties including design of esoteric architectural bits and of some ASIC pieces, acting as "speaker to power supply designers," sitting in far too many meetings, and working with our patent attorneys. I'm working now on some Verilog desing in a ServerNet interface ASIC, after having handled the technical side of applying for many basic ServerNet patents (as an inventor on over a dozen), and acting as a member of the core team that designed the ServerNet protocols. Tandem hired me in March 1989 to work fault-tolerance aspects of the "Integrity S2" project. I've worked on S2, some successor projects, and the Cougar/PUMA/ServerNet efforts. Compaq acquired Tandem in the summer of 1997.

Presentations, papers, etc.

FTCS-25 paper
A paper describing the general ServerNet architecture, with some hints about PUMA. Co-authors Bob Horst and Bill Baker presented this paper at the 25th annual Fault Tolerant Computing Symposium in Pasadena, CA at the end of June 1995. (8 pages)
Internal presentations
  • ServerNet Architecture (given to internal folks & customers)
  • ServerNet Transfers of Information ("Maintenance System" and "routing, topologies, and futures")
    Numberous technical memoranda
    Academic papers
    (working with folks at The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne Center for Reliable and High-Performance Computing and Texas A & M University) (Somewhere I've got a reference to the actual papers...)

    • Who am I?

    I received my BS degree in Electrical Engineering in May, 1983 from Rice University. (While there, I spent much of my time at the student radio station, ktru.) Although I grew up in Gainesville, Florida, I was born in Norman, Oklahoma. Don't worry, though. My family left there before I turned two, so most of the side effects have worn off.

    Before Tandem/Compaq, I worked for a little outfit called KMW Systems Corporation. They were acquired by Andrew Systems. Before KMW, I worked at ROLM Corporation, which was sold by its founders to IBM, and then to Siemens AG. (You don't sense a trend here, do you?)

    This page last updated Tue Jan 5 18:28:24 CST 1999 by William J. Watson.

    Feel free to send me mail.

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