The watermelons here in California are sweet, juicy, and cheap these days.  Seedless, too.  That makes me happy.  Watermelon is one of my favorite fruits.

You know how to enjoy watermelon, right?  Bring one to a picnic, cut everybody some nice wedges, and have at it.  Simple.  Did you know there’s another way?  A cooked way?

A few days ago, I noticed an article about just that type of exotic preparation: watermelon steak.  Apparently, it’s one of the more popular dishes at the Boston restaurant 51 Lincoln.  I decided to give it a go.

To make watermelon steak, get a nice  seedless melon.  Cut some thick slabs (I’d recommend at least two inches thick), put them in a roasting pan, and dot with butter (about half a stick).  Add salt and and a little pepper.  Pour on about a quarter-bottle of cream sherry (that’s the type that has a high sugar content).  Cover with oiled parchment paper, then cover the pan tightly with aluminum foil.  Roast for at least two and a half hours (probably longer, perhaps much longer) at 350 degrees.  The original recipe specified that the roasting should continue until the watermelon is charred, but I couldn’t get that to happen.  Instead, after somewhat more than three hours, I took the roasted melon out of the pan and gave it a quick searing (sort of) in a hot frying pan.  Serve with the roasting juices spooned over, and accompany with feta cheese.

The texture and appearance is remarkably similar to raw tuna, completely unlike fresh watermelon.  There is a bit of watermelon flavor, but the sherry clearly has control.  The saltiness of the feta cheese provides a nice complement to the melon.

Give it a try, if only for the novelty.

It takes a move to realize how much stuff one has acquired.  It takes a few weeks after the move with the stuff still packed away to realize how little stuff one actually uses.

A recent article in Time described the “100 Thing Challenge,” which is a movement to limit one to just 100 possessions.  Ambitious?  Yes.  Realistic?  Most definitely.

With my academic-year housing contract at an end, I was forced to move to a new apartment here at Stanford.  That meant packing up all of my belongings and schlepping them a quarter mile to my new abode.  It took me three trips with my Outback wagon to move everything.

That’s two more trips than it took me to move to California in the first place.

So, somehow, I had acquired an extra two car loads of stuff over nine months.  Incredible!  How much of that do I actually use?

Some of the stuff is obvious dead weight.  I haven’t turned my desktop computer on in six months.  A certain button-up shirt was damn expensive, but it never fit quite right and so I never wear it.  Despite my best intentions, I don’t know if I’ll ever finish reading Don Quixote.

Other stuff falls in a gray area.  I have a great spring-form pan — and when I need it, nothing else will do — but I don’t use it more than a couple times a year.  Similarly, I have a bunch of photos in frames, too many to actively display, but I feel like I’m insulting the people who gave me those photos if I consider discarding the frames (the actual photos are never in jeopardy).

It’s a huge hassle to lug everything around, and it’s a pain to find spots to store everything once the move is complete. It’s even worse when one’s home is as small as my new home.  My entire studio apartment is about the same size as my master bedroom was in my Minnesota townhouse.

The sense of clutter was so intense that I briefly considered coming to California with only my laptop and the clothes on my back.  In hindsight, that level of decluttering would have been impractical, but 100 objects?  Well, that sounds like it just might work.

I’m in the midst of reading A Whole New Mind, mainly because Oprah gave everbody a copy when she delivered Stanford’s commencement address.  The book attempts to sell the idea that right-brained thinking, in addition to left-brained thinking, is needed in order to be competitive in today’s world.  Fair enough.

In response, I have decided to spend the next week left-handed.  That’s not what the book advocates, but I think it will be interesting to experience life as a southpaw.

Two things I’ve already noticed: left-handed mousing is easy, but left-handed writing is hard.  And I foolishly thought that my right-handed writing was illegible.

The friendly folks at reddit threw a party this evening to celebrate the open-source release of their site’s software.  I saw the invitation on the reddit blog, so I decided to attend.  The city isn’t that far from Palo Alto, right?

Just for something different, I took the BART into San Francisco.  It wasn’t quite as comfortable as the Caltrain, but it was a lot cheaper than driving, and it dropped me off just a few blocks from the party’s location, Swig.

Inside, I found about 100 people talking, drinking, and having a good time.  From my conversations, it seemed like everybody was somehow involved in the startup community.   Many seemed to have a Y Combinator connection.   There were at least a few famous faces: Alexis and Steve, the founders of reddit.  There was also a guy who looked a lot like Michael Arrington, but I’m not sure if it was him.  Edit: Yup, it was him.

Yes, the open bar was top-notch, the hors d’ouvers were delicious, and the people were friendly.  It was a good time.   They even had swag:

The data isn’t new, but the delivery is elegant.  And scary.

Another way to look at it is that the NPV of the entitlements is something like $60 trillion.  That’s beyond comprehension.

The only viable solutions to that mess will certainly infuriate the very people whose entitlements are causing the problem.