Message from Rabbett

Hey all!

I am alive and well and still here in Hawai'i. Since 1979. What a long strange trip it has been.

I am currently into my 12th year broadcasting Hawaiian Music on Internet Radio Hawai`i at irh.com out of the house. The tiny house got bigger in '03 when we tore down the old garage and built a 2 story addition where up top I have my beeg room. It has a pretty nice view of the Ko'olau Mountains and sunsets and sunrises are pretty cool.

Besides Hawaiian music I also run 3 webcams out of the windows up here for my listeners enjoyment. It is as virtual as I can get so far. Still working on smells ;)

Here are some recent images from the cams.



I still have a day job selling window renovations - 15 years now. It's a real people job and I have met some really neat folks and learned a lot about life, Hawai`i and have heard stories about the attack on Pearl Harbor that you'll never read about in history books anywhere.

I've been working a lot lately on upgrading windows and overhauling parts of the original house.

My latest project was to put new windows in the old living room which is next in line for a paint job and a new floor.

Here are some photos of my 2 weekend window renovation

http://www.hotspotshawaii.com/irhpages/newwindows/index.htm

Yes, I'm trying to class up the old joint. The original house was built in 1956 and was a whopping 840 square feet. We're now up to 2032 square feet and amazingly this old/new house is now worth almost 3/4 of a mill. Hawai'i housing prices are pretty nuts.

IRH has gone through some changes too. The whole station runs out of a box built in over the stairwell.

This photo was taken a day after I cleaned out the old sony carousels and a bunch of other equipment no longer being used after I tore everything apart to find something that smelled bad.

You know - that awful smell of too much ozone. My first suspect was the power module in the Mackie Mixer. I had had one burn up one time down stairs. Thank god they make the power modules encased in steel. That made the room downstairs smell real bad but the fire was contained in the module. This time after I sniffed every plug and every wall wart and every electrical connection and finally I found it. The culprit turned out to be a power adapter for a LaCie firewire drive. Glad I found it as the housing for this turd is plastic and it could have burned down the house.

IRH now runs playing apple lossless copies of my cd library. After almost ten years of running sony carousels and playing live cds I was forced to change to a hard drive system after the author of Titletrack sold it to some bozos and they screwed it up so bad that records kept crashing into each other. So now I use MegaSeg for the station software. It is about the best radio station software I have ever seen and I only really use a few of its amazing features. I am still primarily a mac guy and only have the one windows machine which encodes the station into a windows media stream. The little 12" iBook on the right encodes an mp3 stream but hardly any of my listeners use it because they all trust Bill Gates and rely on Windows Media Player. I guess because its easy for them.

I've become a real dweeb over the years. I run all my own servers, web, ftp and mail and I run my own dns too.

I love the capabilities and the fact that all this stuff seems to keep the gray matter young and well oiled.

I take a lot of photos of my travels around the island and from around Kailua ( our home town) and you'll see a lot of them on the irh live page and special sections I build from time to time.

http://www.hotspotshawaii.com/irhpages/irhlive.html

Rich wrote me tonight and I caught his email in my spamfire spam filter. What luck that I looked at the trapped message and had a chance to see that he's blogged WXCI memories into life once more. Nicely done!

I hope everyone is still well and happy and if anyone gets a chance drop me a line. Would love to hear from folks and catch up.

Hugh and his wife were in the islands this summer for vacation. I had a chance to have lunch with them at the Big City Diner in Kaimuki and we did a lot of catching up. What's up with Hugh? He never seems to get older?

Our daughter is now 19 and a sophomore at Penn State. Our latest German Shepherd Angel is almost 2 years old and I ride a bike and workout on my bowflex a lot to keep the weight off and do lots of crunches to keep my lower back in check. Other than that, me and Mrs. Rabbett are doing fine.

We recently had 3 hurricanes bearing down on the islands and for the 1st time I took it pretty seriously and put a Hurricane preparedness kit together. ( Our last major storm was Iniki in 1992 - it wiped out a lot of Kaua`i.) We've got 8 cases of Costco water, several cases of corned beef, spam, ramen, noodle soups, canned veggies, mucho paper towels and toilet paper, a new coleman 2 burner propane stove and today I picked up a 3000 watt Honda Generator just in case. I hate the idea of having the fridge get all stinky and having no lights. (- Oh and all 3 Hurricane dissolved so I guess I am now officially over prepared ;)

Such is life. At least now we can make it through any storm that may wander through.
Hope you all have a good winter and I'll make sure to raise a glass of something special your way when Xmas and New Years roll around again.

Aloha for now!
Rabbett