malvasia bianca

Some random comments, after four weeks of Netflix membership:

• One movie at a time works if you’re sure you don’t want to watch more than one movie a week, and if you don’t mind missing occasional weeks due to shipping vagaries. Neither of those proved to be the case for us, so we’ve switched to two movies a week.
• The impetus for signing up was so that we could watch the rest of Haibane Renmei without paying full price. It turns out that that series is good enough that I’m sure we’ll want to watch it again, however.
• A couple of weeks after signing up, they sent me an e-mail asking if I could drop by Los Gatos. (As part of some sort of user-experience study.) I didn’t find the time, but it’s great that the company is doing studies like that. (And I suspect that even the act of asking customers helps build loyalty.)
• Their web design isn’t quite to my taste, for reasons that I’m having a hard time putting my finger on. Having said that, it’s pretty good, and the queue management page is nice.

This weekend’s DVD (we should have had two, but the other seems to have gotten delayed in the mail) was the first volume of the anime version of Hikaru no Go. Not as good as the manga version, but it was okay, and Miranda quite liked it. So she grabbed the first volume of the comic off the shelf, and started reading it. (In fact, she’s reading it right now.) And then she asked me to teach her how to play go. Which was fun, but quite different from teaching an adult how to play go: for one thing, adults are usually trying to figure out how to play as well as possible, while that didn’t particularly seem like an issue to her.

I don’t know if that’s good, bad, or neither. For whatever reason, I find it a little disconcerting (and it’s not the only time I’ve seen such behavior). But it’s a good idea for her to be focused on, say, actually enjoying herself. And one lesson I’ve taken from John Holt is that an important early stage in learning something is just messing around with it, getting your hands dirty with it. To that end, the less pressure there is to use it properly, the less pressure there is to do it well, the better: it increases the chances of the marvel of internal motivation taking hold, if nothing else. (And there are other benefits, too.) We’ll see if she wants to play again after the next DVD arrives…

And, as always happens in these situations, I was reminded that go is Teh Best Game Evar. Yesterday and a game with Karl Fogel a couple of weeks ago were the only times I’ve played go in the last two or three years. There was a reason for that decision – it’s hard for me to find time to regularly attend the local go club, and I find it easier to go cold turkey than to drop by the club once every few months.

But I still miss go. Maybe it’s time to start playing it online again. I think my hands will survive me doing that a little, and it happens fairly frequently these days that it’s 9:30 at night, I’ve finished my daily web browsing, I don’t feel like gracing the world with my words of wisdom, and I have half an hour or 45 minutes to kill. So maybe a go game would hit the spot then? I should look into online servers again, make sure that the world hasn’t changed too much, download clients if necessary. (Any blog readers feel like an online game?)

We’ll be moving to Sun’s main campus towards the end of the month. There must be enough go players there that I can find a game during lunch, surely? I don’t know of any formal go club; I’ll have to look.