Random

...Today was a holiday on Guam -- Discovers' Day -- commemorating the March 6, 1521 discovery of the island by Ferdinand Magellan. Of course, the Chamorros had "discovered" Guam a little earlier than that when they sailed here from Indonesia or the Philippines -- perhaps as early as 2000 BC. No one really knows.

Apparently there was a little miscommunication when Magellan landed in the 16th century. He thought the natives in boats were greeting him with gifts. They thought they were selling trinkets to tourists. When they weren't paid some of the natives boarded the Spanish boats and took some iron. Several people died in the resulting conflict. And Magellan, who failed to appreciate the beauty of this place and people, ended up naming Guam and the Marianas "Las Islas de los Ladrones" -- the Islands of the Thieves.

...It's been 72 degrees and rainy today. The people of Guam are freezing. Rumor has it that the president will declare a federal disaster and send in FEMA with a plane load of parkas. GovGuam has applied for a bank loan with the expected coats as collateral.

...I understand that it actually dropped down to 66 degrees one night in March of 1965. Ah, winter in the tropics.

...I've been working on updating my blog template to make it flow more smoothly with the new blogger. You don't realize how deep the change in blogger is until you start working with the templates. There is some amazing ajax going on in there. Even if you can't write any code you can now do a lot of customization.

So far everything seems to work in all the browsers I've tried -- IE, Firefox, Opera, even works well in Safari. Looks best in Firefox, though.