Welcome to the home page of Bill Cattey.

I serve as Linux Platform Coordinator for Client Support Services (CSS) in the MIT Department of Information Services and Technologies.

Here are links to various interesting aspects of my work:

• This year's work goals and my roles -- my roles for the year, my goals and their status.
• Milestones -- weekly accomplishments of significance and an inventory of meetings attended.

I was born on March 13, 1960 in suburban Connecticut.

I went to Choate Rosemary Hall for high school. There I got my first taste of using a computer on a PDP-8. I discovered I was good at computers, but even better at the politics of expanding the facilities, and collaborating with vendors.

I got a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science and Engineering from MIT, and now I work there.

I pretty much make it my job to learn the deep insides of computers so my customer doesn't have to. It's challenging for me and helpful to them. I started putting my efforts to building up the school computing infrastructure back in high school, and then returned to MIT after a short stint at BBN to keep doing it.

I'm a big believer in a thing called "Systems Thinking". I believe that we can model computers, business, and teams of people with many of the same skills. I've made a bit of a name for myself making broken programs work, saving projects at risk, and getting dysfunctional teams back on track.

Some of the companies that work with us know me as "The Customer From Hell." I don't let promises stay broken, I'm always ready with suggestions of how to recover from some failed interaction, and I can make "a convincing business case" when important people up the chain of command need to get involved in fixing a bad situation.

As a child I was very straight laced. Since then, I've made a point of trying many vices and keeping the ones I like best. I'd love to go into the sordid details of my personal life, unfortunately that will have to wait until I can create a web presence walled off from my professional life.

Until then, here are pointers to things I think are fun that won't get me in trouble:

Well, actually, my personal life is sufficiently odd that I can't think of anything to put here that wouldn't get me in trouble.

I have strong opinions on many things. I have created a collection of web pages with my various white papers, reviews, and opinions and editorials.

I have decided to risk infamy by publishing my poetry here.