:: Troutmaster blog :: December 2003 archive

:: Tuesday, December 30, 2003 ::

I found this link to some interesting letters to the editor about the issue of drivers licenses for illegal immigrants. If you are like Sandra Hietala and don't like the term "illegal" to describe illegal immigrants then I invite you to write to me and tell me why. Overall I thought all of the letters were thoughtful and had good points. Up to this point I have to agree with the people that are against giving licenses to illegal immigrants. Why reward illegal behavior with the privilege of a drivers license. That's right, a license is a privilege. I started thinking about this subject again because I saw a news story about a teen group called Latino Focus that was organizing protests against the Governator because he repealed the illegal immigrants drivers license legislation. When they interviewed the kids they didn't give any reason why people should support them. I think the supporters of drivers licenses for illegal immigrants need to do a better job of convincing the rest of us that it is a good idea. Up to this point they haven't given any solid, logical reasons for why they want drivers licenses for illegal immigrants. Anyway, I just thought I would bring up the letters to the editor.
:: Tom 4:22 PM:: [View/Post Comments]
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I spent my vacation today working out and watching The Last Samurai. Overall I would say that the movie was very good. There was a lot fighting and drama, but they didn't make it overly sappy. I would recommend this movie.
:: Tom 6:12 PM:: [View/Post Comments]
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I went for a bike ride on the Coyote Creek Trail today and I saw the biggest bobcat I've ever seen. It was standing on the trail looking at a deer and wagging it's little stub of a tail. It came up to about my knees and when I came up behind it I asked "What are you looking at?" and it turned around to look at me and then bounded off into the woods. The deer ran off as well.
:: Tom 4:10 PM:: [View/Post Comments]
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I'm back from my Christmas trip and I'm still a little tired. We went to Chukchansi on Christmas, stayed the night there, and then drove to Sugar Bowl on the 26th. We snowboarded all day and then drove back to San Jose that night. It was a fun trip overall. I made a little bit of money at the Chukchansi casino and had a pretty good day on the slopes at Sugar Bowl. We were joined at Sugar Bowl by Jenny and Rong.

:: Tom 9:00 PM:: [View/Post Comments]
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Merry Christmas Everyone! I'm at home right now. We just finished opening presents. Later today we are going to head back to Chukchansi for the Christmas buffet. This time I'm only going to play enough blackjack to pay for dinner. And I might put money in for a slot machine if there is a red sports car because I had a dream about winning one. Timber's parents are going to do their cooking on Saturday instead of today. Tomorrow we are going to go snowboarding at Sugarbowl because Santa brought us lift tickets.
:: Tom 12:09 PM:: [View/Post Comments]
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I started off my vacation on a fairly good note. I ran a lot of errands and found that there were scores of people everywhere I went. I was thinking to myself that these people should be at work, but I guess everyone must take their vacation at the end of the year. After I ran my errands I had a 5 PM soccer game, and then after that I went to the Sharks game. The sharks won 2-1 over Anaheim.

:: Tom 10:19 AM:: [View/Post Comments]
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I finally got a chance to watch "Return of the King". Leading up to watching this movie I would tell people that this was one of the few movies that I would pay full price to watch. As it turned out I paid matinee fees for it. Overall I thought it was a very good movie with a good portion of sap included. It followed along with the book fairly well. Now I'm looking forward to getting the combined extended version trilogy on DVD around Christmas time next year. That is going to be awesome. Other than that this weekend was fairly quiet. I'm now on vacation until January 5th, so I'm going to enjoy my time off. And to top the good news my cold is almost over. If it is all the way gone tomorrow morning that would make my cold last a total of 5 days. That has got to be an all time record or something. When I get a cold it usually lasts about two weeks.
:: Tom 10:02 PM:: [View/Post Comments]
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I must go to bed soon. I'm getting a cold and I just finished my work for the day. I think it's quite ironic that I'm now getting sick when tomorrow is my last day working for the rest of this year. I guess that's how I've gotten away with taking one sick day in my four years in the working world. I wait until I go on vacation to get sick! Anyway, more vacation adventures to come!
:: Tom 1:22 AM:: [View/Post Comments]
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December 12th
As of my last blog entry we left the house late because Timber's work needed her to work late. We got to Sacramento around 9 PM to pick up Jackie and then we were on our way to Reno. On the way up to Reno we had to pass over Donner pass, and along the way we saw that it was raining a lot and we thought that getting
over the pass would be extremely difficult. The pass ended up being pretty pleasant overall. We got to the Nugget around midnight and called it a night.

December 13th
We woke up fairly early and got on the road toward Alpine Meadows at 8:30
AM. Alpine Meadows had received a decent amount of snow over the past few days. The lift tickets were $39 and we got on our first lift at 10:42 AM. We met up with Jackie's friend Peter and did about 9 runs throughout the rest of the day. Overall the conditions were wet but not terribly icy. The snow that they had received was rained on and the top layer was a little hard. After we were done at Alpine Meadows we went back to Reno, ran a few errands, and then went to eat at Sushi Pier 2. Sushi Pier 2 is an all you can eat sushi buffet. You sit at the sushi bar and then tell the sushi chef what you want and they'll make it for you right then. It was pretty cool. I tried a lot of things that I hadn't tried before because we had that flexibility. We also had (raw) quail egg sushi rolls. That was interesting. After dinner we went back to our room and crashed.

December 14th
We left the hotel a little later than expected. But we got to Sugar Bowl at about 11 AM. Our first run was at 11:42 AM. We did about 7 runs at Sugar Bowl. We met up with Peter again and were treading through fresh powder all over the mountain. It was awesome. The conditions today were way better than yesterday. We left Sugar Bowl a little early so that we could get Jackie back to Sacramento in time for her flight home.

:: Tom 11:06 PM:: [View/Post Comments]
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Saddam has been captured. I saw on the news that people were shooting guns into the air and some were dancing in the streets. I was surprised when I saw it on the news. I wonder what will happen next?

:: Tom 10:31 AM:: [View/Post Comments]
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It is almost 6:30 PM and I'm waiting for Timber so that we can head to Reno tonight. The drive through the mountains is probably going to suck. But at least we should avoid most of the traffic. Timber's work asked her to do something right as we were leaving the house. I recommend that everyone not work for her company. :-) I hope we have some caffeine for the trip...
:: Tom 6:27 PM:: [View/Post Comments]
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How about that Devastatin' Dave? I looked on the iTunes music store for it but I couldn't find it. Thanks to Timber for sending that to me. She sent me a few other ones that were pretty cheesy too. That begs the question, WHAT were we thinking back then? We should hold our parents accountable. :-)

:: Tom 11:34 AM:: [View/Post Comments]
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Our plans for the weekend have changed. We will not be going to Kirkwood after all. Instead we are going to Alpine Meadows on Saturday and then either Sugarbowl or NorthStar on Sunday. We are going to stay in the Nugget. It should be a fun weekend.
:: Tom 10:09 PM:: [View/Post Comments]
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Very cool development. But I wonder how citizens of the town and people that come to this town are going to be able to access the web wirelessly. Is it going to be free? Are they going to have to pay Aiirnet? How is the pricing going to be structured? These are a lot of things that other places are going to look at to see if they can use what is learned by their experience in their own towns. I would love to see this sort of thing in Silicon Valley. Perhaps it could be "free" wireless connections that get paid through our taxes much like street lights. Or maybe once the infrastructure is in place we can be charged for usage much like electricity. I think there are lots of possibilities.Yahoo! News - Cerritos, Calif., Goes Wireless Citywide
:: Tom 11:52 AM:: [View/Post Comments]
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I can't say that I agree with the policy to keep certain nations out of the contractor bidding, but I do understand. Yahoo! News - Bush Rejects Europeans on Iraq Contract Flap
:: Tom 11:18 AM:: [View/Post Comments]
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It has been decided that we are going to hit Kirkwood this weekend. The weather report shows heavy snow today, and then snow every day through Sunday. I guess it will take a little while to get up there because of the snow but that should make the conditions great. I'm looking forward to the trip.

:: Tom 10:26 AM:: [View/Post Comments]
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I had a lot of fun this weekend, but I also got a lot of things accomplished. I went to a Christmas party on Friday in Palo Alto. The party was fun and I got to meet some new people and see a few other people that I hadn't seen in quite a while. On Saturday Timber and I got our Christmas tree with Jenny and Rong. We went to a place called Battaglia Ranch which is on highway 101 between Morgan Hill and Gilroy. We got a saw, selected our tree, and cut it down. After we put it in the cart we wheeled it over and the employees put it onto some sort of shaking device that is designed to get out all the loose needles and other stuff that might be in the tree. Then they wrapped it up in netting, we paid for the tree (about $30 for a 6 foot tree) and we were on our way. I enjoyed the experience. Later, on Saturday, we went up to the East Palo Alto IKEA to get a few things. Then we had a late meal at Max's Opera Cafe. I had never eaten at Max's before and I didn't know it was in the Stanford Mall. They call it an Opera Cafe because someone plays the piano and sings while people eat. I made the remark that it is like eating at Nordstom's. After our late meal we decided to go to the 24 hour Walmart in Union City so that we could find a tree stand and a wreath. We were successful on both counts. On Sunday we ran other errands and got the tree decorating started. We now have the tree up and wrapped with lights and a few ornaments. But there is still more work to do.
:: Tom 10:33 AM:: [View/Post Comments]
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If it weren't for Netflix I wouldn't rent stupid movies. Case in point, the 50 Cent: Shoot First movie has to be the worst piece of crap I've seen in a very long time. It was so bad I watched all of it to get as many laughs out of it as I could. First, it is supposed to be some sort of unauthorized biography of 50 Cent, and throughout the movie they have no music by 50 Cent and they only have pictures of him. The rest of the movie is like a bad public service announcement with random people talking about what it was like to grow up in the hood selling crack and carrying guns and stuff. And in most documentaries they at least tell you who the people are and how they are knowledgeable on the subject, but it just seemed like these were random people from the hood. Overall it was like a bad parody on Saturday Night Live. Very entertaining, but make sure you don't take it seriously.

:: Tom 3:05 PM:: [View/Post Comments]
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I attended a going-away-dinner last night at a place in Palo Alto called Caffe Riace. As you might expect it is an Italian Ristorante. We had Insalate di cipolle e pomodoro and some bread as the appetizer. The main dish that I had was the Cannelloni della Mamma which was pretty good. The presentation for my dish was good, along with the temperature (not too hot, not too cold). Also, the consistency of the pasta was pretty good overall. I only had a bite or two where the pasta was a little more chewy than expected. And the sauce for the dish was very good. With dinner I had a glass of Chianti which was also very good. So overall I would recommend Caffe Riace. But when you go don't expect it to be cheap. There were three of us at dinner and the total came about to be about $40 each. But the Italian that I went with approved, and that says it all.
:: Tom 10:00 AM:: [View/Post Comments]
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I started a new personal project yesterday. I got an IBM Thinkpad 701CS from ebay yesterday and my mission is to get linux on it and get it working with my wireless network at home. It is a tall order seeing that the battery doesn't work and that I need to upgrade the RAM and from what research I've done thus far it doesn't seem to work easily with linux. If it turns out that linux won't work with it I know that Windows 95 will. But that is a definite last option.
:: Tom 9:06 AM:: [View/Post Comments]
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It looks like this is the first skiing death of the year. Pretty sad. California girl dies in Sierra ski accident near Tahoe: "while "
:: Tom 4:21 PM:: [View/Post Comments]
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I cooked the chicken dish when I got home. I think it ended up looking a lot better than it tasted. I generally prefer to marinate the chicken so that you can taste the flavor throughout the chicken. But here's the recipe:
3/4 cup of finely diced walnuts
1/4 cup plain bread crumbs
2 tablespoons flour
1 1/2 teaspoons dry basil leaves
3/4 teaspoon dry rosemary leaves
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 egg
2 1/2 pounds chicken breast

In a shallow dish, combine walnuts, bread crumbs, flout, basil, rosemary, and salt. In another shallow dish, lightly beat egg, then in walnut mixture. Bake 40-45 minutes at 350 F, until crust is browned, or until chicken is done.
:: Tom 12:03 AM:: [View/Post Comments]
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It is raining right now and I'm getting ready to head home. I'm going to try to cook a really good chicken dish tonight. I'll try to take a photo of it if I can remember. Also, I usually like the Titans, but I hope they lose tonight. I have new incentive to see Indy do well.
:: Tom 5:57 PM:: [View/Post Comments]
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