Angband is a game of patience. It's going to take a long time to finish which entices people to take shortcuts and that's when the game gets you. Once again I got my character killed, this time at dungeon level 36, character level 32. This one was much better than the last one. All my stats were over 18/01 and a few were getting to or over 18/100, 97 armor class, five attacks each doing about 25 damage. Then I got impatient.

It started when I went down to level 35. By now it was almost routine -- go down and kill everything, picking up 20k gold in items, then go up and sell those items and repeat. I was confident and complacent, a feeling that was reinforced when I met Bert the Stone Troll, whom I dispatched quite easily and all of his troll buddies too. I then fell down to level 36, a shame since I had a really good feeling for level 35.

Undaunted I kept wandering around. I met Shelob, Spider of Darkness. Shoot, I know who she is, so I was apprehensive. She summoned a bunch of spider friends and the room was chock full of spiders. But that also meant that she had nowhere to run. In hand to hand combat Shelob was no match for me and I quickly killed her and her brethren. Even an attack by some nexus hounds didn't spoil my mood. They hit me with chaos, which rearranges your stats, but since they were all high by then it didn't hurt me much.

Another bunch of trolls, led by Bill the Stone Troll. Again no match for my character. Then I went to another small monster vault and got sideswiped by a Vampire. I hate losing experience. Phase Door away, drink my next to last Potion of Life, kill the Vampire. That last part was a harder than it should have been as I Phase Doored next to a necromaner, who summoned a Nightmare. How tough can it be? Double speed, drains life, ouch ouch ouch. Again I Phase Doored away and drank my last Potion of Life.

Here comes the Vampire, shoot it down. Hmm, now I'm intruigued by the Night- mare and I think I can kill it by Phase Dooring and shooting it as it closes in. I circle around and run into him (apparently he was thinking the same thing). Drain life, ouch. Ok, now I'm mad. I've got to be tougher than him. With a shrill yell I attack. Hmm, his hit points aren't going down that as quickly as mine. Uh oh, better stop. Down to 50 hit points and some messages. I'm hit, I'm hit, I'm hit, I'm dead. Rats. I've got to control myself better next time...

Mozilla for Mac OS X is now in the nightly build engine. That means that it's finally synced to the main branch. So I download the latest build and it's quite an improvement over two weeks ago. SSL seems to work and it now only takes about 5% of the CPU when idle (instead of 50%). It's still slow and kind of raw, but it does the minimal that I need a web browser to do so I'll try using it instead of Internet Explorer (down with Microsoft!)...

Slashdot posted a story that MAPS will become a subscription service starting in August. Something like $1000 a year plus some amount per 1000 users of an ISP. Nonprofits and individuals can apply for free access (access is being implemented through an ACL of allowed IP addresses). Personally the RBL server didn't do me much good since all my email is relayed from CSUA so it all looks like it's coming from CSUA as far as my mail server is concerned.

Another Slashdot story (I must say that occassionally they have interesting stories and links without the editorializing of other sites). This one is about a Swedish company that's developed a filter for content providers. It can distinguish between different ISPs and it allows content providers to charge ISPs for access (rather than trying to charge individual users). I suppose that's easier since you're filtering based on IP ranges rather than making people type in a username/password.

Both these are pointing to the growing demand to make money off of Internet usage, which is not a bad idea. Personally, if I can't get it for free, I didn't need that service or content. But if it gets really bad it'll be interesting to see what I will pay for.