I was so lucky that Bill used to live in Virginia. Early in my career, I started attending the Virginia Search Marketing Meetups (which later became the DC Search Marketing Meetups that I ran for six years) - and who was a regular attendee and speaker, but Bill! Often in a small group of 10-15 people, he would directly answer your SEO questions. He helped me gain my footing in the industry and even later as I ran my own consultancy was willing to catch up (in California) to help me troubleshoot a client's more complicated entity disambiguation issue.

He's been such a great "colleague" all of these years and an amazing person to know.