About the Kwajalein Address Book

Welcome to the Kwajalein Address Book! I created this site to serve as a contact point for current and former residents of USAKA (United States Army, Kwajalein Atoll).

Kwajalein Atoll is a ring of islands located in Micronesia and is approximately 2,200 miles from Tokyo, Japan; Darwin, Australia; and Honolulu, Hawaii (see a map). The residence islands are Kwajalein and Roi-Namur. The larger, Kwajalein, has a land area of approximately one square mile.

I originally formed the idea for the KAB while I was an undergraduate student at the University of Florida. After spending the majority of my years on Kwajalein and having graduated from high school there, I had a number of friends scattered across the United States and the world. As I moved towards graduation, I began to lose touch with friends as they graduated or moved to new places. Later, while on a trip to Kwajalein for the Christmas holidays, I learned that I was not alone in my feelings. So, I took my rather slim address book of Kwajalein contacts and wrote the first version of the KAB. It had around fifteen names on it and was single page.

I submitted the page to the search engines and, to my suprise, I started receiving regular requests from people to add their addresses to the page. Soon, the list of names was too long for one page. Thus: the birth of the second version of the Kwajalein Address Book which divided the KAB alphabetically. The requests kept rolling in and I found it hard to keep up with the workload. A later revision was to add a form which prepared each entry for me, but I still had to manually cut-and-paste each entry into the appropriate page. In comparision to the original method of adding an entry, the form was a tremendous time savings. While in college, this method worked fine.

After I started working, time was short and a further evolution of the KAB was necessary. After some surfing, I found a set of Perl scrips that, with modification, could fully automate the KAB. This system worked for the bulk of the history of the KAB.

I heard from one KAB user that he thought his address had been "harvested" from the KAB and used to send spam. I'm not sure how he arrived at this conclusion, because I had been using a special email address, one I use nowhere else, on my KAB entry and had never received spam to this address. Nonetheless, it seemed like a legitimate risk to me. I also wanted to incorporate many of the requests I had received over the years to improve the KAB. So, I decided to rewrite from scratch the Perl scripts that power the KAB. One of the most major changes was to hide all email addresses from public view. To send email, you must send it via the web interface. The KAB will send your message directly to the other user's email address for you.

I suppose I've rambled enough about the evolution of the KAB and a little about myself :) I really hope you enjoy the Kwajalein Address Book. It has helped me get in touch with friends I had not spoken to since I was in George Seitz Elementary School. I hope it can do the same for you.

-- Matt Goff (1981 to 1992, KHS Class of '92)