@mae

Wow, i can’t believe I’m back on this thing! This was my GATE/TECH blog, but now, sadly, high school has no GATE, so I miss GATE so much! I had GATE since elementary, and I always WILL be in it. I miss learning about technology stuff. I’ve learned so much from my teacher. I grew a love to technology because of that class. Before, I had NO idea about technology. A camera’s a camera. What’s the difference. I learned that, by learning how to take pictures, you can create beautiful images that can catch someone’s eye. I learned that Macbooks are sexy, bro. I learned how to research things, cautions about the internet, how to edit photos and video, etc. This class has taught me a lot, and I hope that it teaches you too.

I’ve heard people say that they don’t like this class, but I beg to differ. Besides the research, work, and our teacher’s bipolar moments (Sorry Miss!), the class was always so much fun. The best part was projects. We would always try to psych each other out, so ours is better! That class made me feel like a nerd! I made great friends and met a cool teacher.

To those of you who have her now, keep calm and surf the web. I used to think the class was “UGH”. Now, I’m glad. I met some of my closest friends there, and I felt normal with my grades. Sometimes I’d feel smart, and sometimes I’d feel dumb. Enjoy her class, and you won’t think that it sucks. (:

Juliette, Amanda and I have created a special podcast for you all.

Here it is: JAM Fluffy hair rules!

So, in my last post, I told you that I was again entering in the National History Day competition. Well, the first step to getting there is complete. First step was winning the school competition. Amanda and I won that, FIRST PLACE! I kept my hopes up, but iI didn’t completely expect to win. Now, we are off to island wide. It is such a great experience to go through all of this.

How did we create it?

Well, we used the website called Weebly. National History Day has used Weebly to create the websites. The normal Weebly and the NHD Weebly is similar, but if you wish to enter, you go to nhd.weebly.com. It really is such an easy site to create a website. Everything is so organized and easy. After creating the website, we started researching. We first started on looking for websites. In class, everyday until we turned it in, we’ve been working on the websites and looking online in class. After school and on fieldtrips, we would looks through primary resources. We went to the Micronesia Area Research Center (MARC) and sifted through a box of old newspapers from that time and a few documents. It was a really funny, fun, and stressing activity. To create the whole website, we buckled down and did the work.

What were the challenges?

There were a lot of challenges for us. At first, it was pretty okay. We were doing good, but the worst of the worst had happened! My laptop’s charger broke. It would not charge at all. It was terrible! My laptop was dead, so I wasn’t able to work on the website at night. Although I had no computer (or money to go to an internet cafe), but that didn’t stop us from doing our work. We did as much as we could without me having a laptop. With that work, we won FIRST PLACE, school-wide. After that was getting it perfected for the island-wide competition, but right as soon as we won, my internet went down. I am not that rich, so my internet going down is a very common thing to happen. I have had my internet go down before, but never during a crucial time like that. So, those were pretty much the challenges. They were pretty tough to get by, but we managed to get through it.

What did you enjoy doing?

Of course with a project, I have challenges, but i also have FUN! My partner was Amanda, and she is really fun to be around. She always makes me laugh no matter what. She makes me laugh just by being her. So, Amanda is a big part in the fun of it. It was awesome! I just love her so much, and I am glad that I decided to choose her as my partner. I have known her since 6th grade, so we go way back. She was one of my very first friends here at Untalan. The other part was the competition. The competition between our classmates and us were very entertaining. They figured that we would win, so most of them really worked so hard. I especially think the fun groups to work with were Robyn, Juiette, Reyn, and Trevor. During the school competition, Juliette and Robyn were the fun ones to be around. We actually tried to (well, talked about it) rig the competition so that we would win and go on to GHD. After we won the school competition, Reyn and Trevor were our competition, so we had lots of fun with them!

In the end, we won,and we are still awaiting on the winner of GHD… We are hoping that we win and go on to nationals. It would be such a treat and an amazing experience to go through again. The wait begins…

Guess what? Yupp! You guessed it! I’m entering in Guam’s History Day! I entered about 2 years ago, and now I’m entering again! It’s so much fun, but a lot of work. Let me tell you about my topic for this year’s theme: “Debate & Diplomacy: Successes, Failures, and consequences.”

My topic for Guam History Day is Vietnam War Refugees. My partner, Amanda, and I will be having so much fun on this project. It relates to the theme as a diplomacy. Guam helped out the Vietnam citizens during the Vietnam civil war. Guam used its diplomatic ways to help out the Vietnamese. I think it is very important to Guam history because it shows how Guam can use it’s diplomatic ways to affect other nation’s lives.

I’m very excited to learn about many things. I don’t know much about this topic, which is why I want to do this project. I want to know what part of Guam was used during the war. Guam is a big-ish place, so I want to know what part was used. I also want to know what is Saigon. That sounds like a cool name. And what is Tin City? Are there any survivors? There probably are.

I also want to know what it was like during those times. The quotes that people say about the war are usually terrible. I know this is going to sound weird, but I want to know, in detail, what Guam actually did. People tell me what Guam did, and I look at them with a confused face. Most importantly, I want to become more interested in the topic more than I am now. I can’t wait to do this project!

According to Guam PDN, the Senate removed the measures for war survivors. There was a bill at the Senate that was asking for Guam’s rightful war reparations which did not come through. The bill was passed by the House of Representatives, but it was not COMPLETELY passed by the senate. The Senate made a few changes. Just after 24 hours when the survivors of the Japanese occupation were told that they may finally be able to receive war reparations, a woman, Rita Santos Cruz, had to be informed that the Senate has denied the bill that was to release upon $100 million dollars to the WWII survivors. The reparations plan provided $10,000 to $25,000 for victims of the occupation or the living relatives of those killed during the war.

“I’m getting pissed off already, because they are treating us like toys.” -Rita Santos Cruz

Guam Delegate Madeleine Bordallo had expressed optimism that the provision finally would be accepted when the Senate worked on a compromise defense authorization bill, but yesterday, Michigan Senator Carl Levin announced that the language providing for the claims had been rejected by the Senate. Of course, if you heard that and you were them, you could obviously get upset.

“I am extremely disappointed in the decision by Senate leaders to remove Guam War Claims from the compromise defense authorization bill. I will be meeting with House and Senate leaders tomorrow to discuss the way forward for this important legislation.” -Congress Woman, Madeleine Bordallo

The Senate is currently considering a changed version of the defense authorization bill passed by the House of Representatives. Because Senate leaders knew that multiple senators continued to object to the war claims in the defense authorization bill, they made the decision to create and change the bill and pass it without war claim. Rita Cruz said that after years of pushing for reparations from the U.S. government, she was so frustrated she would even consider legal action to get reparations for the island’s aging survivors. Sorry Guam. Looks like we won’t be getting our reparations.

“How many times do we have to go through this? How many more years? What is it going to take? Are our people worth it?” -Senator Frank Blas Jr.

How do you feel about all of this? I don’t like it at all. In my defense, I don’t like it all. I completely agree with Rita because it’s not fair, that the people who went through it don’t get anything for seeing and going through SO much at such an early age. Kids should be PLAYING with toys instead of being TREATED like toys. You can’t play with people, then dump them and totally forget about them. It is NOT fair to the wonderful brave people who lived through that tragic time. The Senate REALLY needs to fix that up. They would not be happy if it was THEIR family. The have to think about how the elders feel. They should put themselves in their shoes. This is NOT a good thing. I’m sorry Guam. ):

Should Guam re-evaluate it’s stance on commonwealth and try once more to change its status from territory to commonwealth?

I think that Guam should try to get their commonwealth that they wanted. They started to want commonwealth in the 80′s. It’s been about 20 years since they’ve given up. The bill for Guam’s commonwealth is still down there in congress, but way way WAY deep down in bills that aren’t as important, so they will get to it later. We all know that most of the time when people say that they’ll get to it later, they usually don’t. They usually say that for a positive thinking, but we all know that probably won’t get touched again until all is right with the world OR someone steps up and re-introduces it back again tot he politicians. Congress probably hasn’t touched that bill since the 80′s or maybe hasn’t even seen it. The congress and presidential people aren’t the same as they were in the 80′s. We have a new president. We have a new congressional representative. We have new voters. Guam should re-introduce the thought of Guam being a commonwealth to the new political  powers that run our country and island.

Citizens don’t want to try and be a commonwealth anymore because they tried SO VERY hard in the 80′s and ultimately failed. They went through a tragic failure in trying to get Guam a commonwealth. Being a territory is fine, but being a commonwealth is what the people wanted. Do the citizens still want commonwealth? I don’t know. They haven’t spoken about commonwealth in a long time, so people probably don’t know what commonwealth IS! I know because when I first heard about commonwealth i had NO idea what it was. I’ve heard about the CNMI: Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands, but i never understood what commonwealth was. When people don’t talk about something, the memory usually fades away. Get commonwealth started again. We have some new generations of people that may be willing to put all their effort into it.

I recently just read the blog “zenhabits” by Leo Babauta. Zenhabits was named one of top blogs of 2010, and now i know why.

Usually when i read something online, it’s not fun. They usually always use big words and make things more complicated than they’re supposed to be. When i read Leo’s blog entries, i understand it more than any other things i read online. When he writes, he uses normal language, and not a complicated language that makes everything look big and complicated. So, one quality for a good writer is to write with good grammar for everyone to understand and not get bored to death. HAHA!!!

“Be Content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you” Lao Tzu

That is a quote Leo used on his blog from one of his entries called “You’re Already Perfect”. He has many, many, MANY other blog entries that help you with your life. And those entries are easy to read, somewhat easy to understand, and useful to know. Another good quality is to write about things people might want to know about. If you write about things that make no sense to the human eye, no one will want to read it. When you write about a certain thing, there must a specific audience that you would to it. When you know which audience you are appealing to, your language barrier must only stay in THAT barrier. If you’re writing for teenagers, you won’t want to put “BIG” words in there that they won’t understand at all. If you’re writing for adults, you may not want to use simple childish words, such as “thingamabober”, stuffy”, and “shizzleness”. Adults won’t want to read that.

“… what exactly are my qualifications? My answer is that I have no formal qualifications. I am not an expert, or a doctor, or a coach. I haven’t made millions of dollars and I’m not the world’s greatest athlete.” –Leo Babuata

There are more qualities in a good writer. You have to like it. If you hate writing and reading, you can’t be a really good blogger and writer. You gotta post a lot to get better at it. If you only post one entry a month, no one is going to like it because things will all be packed in there from what you wanted to write before.

You also have to have the drive to write. If you procrastinate and say “oh, nevermind. I’ll do it later,” you probably will forget and not do it at all. You CAN NOT procratinate. You gotta say “okay, I’m going to do this. Let’s go for it.” You can’t be, “UGH.”

Most importantly: YOU MUST BE ORGANIZED! Without organization, you can’t get any work done. All your work will be all over the place. Those are good qualities. These are my opinions alright ? If you don’t agree, i understand. Everyone has their own opinions. I want to be a good writer, but I’m only half way there.

Click here to go to:
Zenhabits
Leo Babauta’s story
You’re Already Perfect Blog Entry

@maepicayo

Project: Interests and Difficulty

Blog Entry #4

Hello! Well, telling you the interesting and difficult things about my project will make no sense unless you know what my project is about. So first of all, I surveyed the students in my Gate/Tech class about how many beds, siblings, and pairs of shoes they have. I took those  numbers and calculated them into mean(average), median, and mode. I created a powerpoint presentation of those numbers and calculations.  Then present it to my class. Pretty easy right? ;D

There were a few interesting things that I learned in doing this project. First, obviously, I learned some strange things about my classmates. I learned how many beds they have. I learned how many siblings they have, and I learned how many pairs of shoes they have. One of the strange things that I noticed was that the person with the most siblings was NOT the person with the most beds. Because of that, I’m guessing the person with the most beds either does not use all the beds, or there are other adults in their house. The person with the least beds is an only child so I can understand that. When I asked them about how many pairs of shoes they have, I was just curious! HAHA!!! Ohh yeahh!!! VERY INTERESTING! X’D

The only difficult things are pretty stupid of me to say here, but I’ll say it anyways. The hard things were putting the presentation together and presenting it to the class. Pretty stupid huh? The only reason why it was difficult putting it together was because I had no internet for me to get all the stuff I wanted. XD HAHA! Then, presenting it to the class was hard because the computers we have in the room did not play my presentation correctly, so I had to bring in my own laptop. I had to carry it all day, and it was heavy. HAHA STUPID AGAIN RIGHT?! Other than that, it was a pretty easy project. OH! And the time limit!  Finishing it up on time was somewhat difficult . That’s pretty much my project.

Watch my presentation down there. Ain’t it pretty? ;D

Click Here !

The big race for governor, lieutenant governor, senators, attorney general, and congress person was official as of this morning. According to Guam PDN, at 2:00am this morning the the votes for governor and lieutenant governor were CLOSE! The running candidates for governor and lieutenant governor were Edward Calvo and Raymond Tenorio versus Carl Gutierrez and Frank B. Aguon. With CalvoTenorio (Republican) and GutierrezAguon (Democrat) running for the leadership of Guam, CalvoTenorio won by a close tallying of votes. CalvoTenorio had a count of 19,879 votes while GutierrezAguon had 19,296 votes. That gives them a 583 difference in votes.

According to KUAM, Mr. Eddie Calvo went to cast his vote at J.Q. San Miguel Elementary School in Toto. He woke up the morning morning of the election thinking, “tonight is gonna be a good night.” I think Eddie Calvo is a pretty nice guy with high spirits. The campaign gave Eddie a boost of energy. He was proud to be part of the campaign. “It’s been a very rewarding campaign just met thousands of the good people of this island and it just kind of reinvigorated me, what a beautiful island and what a beautiful people we are.”  He added, “Thank you so much. I’ve had the greatest supporters in the world starting from my family and my extended family.  Again, the thousands that participated in the campaign that I consider family – thank you and God bless you.” And win or lose, Gutierrez will stay in politics. Well guess what ? You LOST! xD

According to Marianas Variety, Calvo said that he felt was very good about the count, but he is not discounting the possiblity of a recount. At the Demoratic headquarters of GutierrezAguon, Gutierrez said, with the given close numbers, “the election is not over yet.” After the election was over, Calvo said, “the people have spoken.” Looks like Gutierrez wants a recount……

According to Guam News Watch, it is said that Ray Tenorio’s mother’s security company was asked to guard the Guam election ballots. When they were transporting the ballots from the University of Guam to the Guam Election Commission, they noticed a security company’s (Denanche Security) guard following them. Later, that same guard was there that whole time watching of the ballots. Guam Watch took a little field trip over to the Guam Elections Commission’s Office to ask about the ballots. Click on the link to the article to read the interview with Jerome Teregeyo about the security guard.

According to Pacific News Center, Gutierrez got what he wanted. The Guam Election Commission voted unanimous to certify the Gubernatorial results Saturday evening after an all day re-count that saw problems with the tabulation machines and stray ballots. The final tally after the recount gave CalvoTenrio  20,066 votes, and GuiterrezAguon got 19,579.  Calvo’s margin of victory shrank from 583 votes Wednesday to 487 after the Saturday recount as a result of the reconciliation process that the Guam Election Commission Board went through all day Saturday. The tabulating machines were set to kick back “over-votes” and “under-votes” and damaged ballots. Example of an “over-vote” would be a case where a voter not only filled in the oval to select one candidate, but also wrote in their candidates choice in the Write-In line. An “under-vote” or “blank ballot” example would be a ballot on which the impression of the penciled-in oval  beside the canidate of choice was too light for the tabulator to read. Tuesday, these types of ballots were not counted in the vote total, Saturday they were. 

In the end, all hard work the candidates went through payed off. Starting Januray, Guam has a new leader that promises to give us the Guamanian Dream we’ve always wanted. CalvoTenorio will be the new leaders of our beautiful island. The demorats will run our legislature and the republicans represent Guam as leaders.

@maepicayo.

Image: ‘Melancholy [Explored]‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22779530@N02/4708898966
Image by Peter Shanks

Creative commons is a type of copyright license. It is a license that allows users all over the world to use the picture for free. In “big” words, it is s copyrighted image that is open to he public domain. Creative Commons is important to all people who write, especially bloggers. When a blogger blogs about something (like what I am doing), someone could see what you posted, and if you posted something FROM THEM, then they will probably get mad. Think about it. If someone took something from you that you did, then you’d probably be mad at them too. Creative Commons is a good thing for people to know about, especially if they do not want to get sued from the owner of the item you took. If you want t post something i suggest you look for creative common images. I know I will.