Doc Sidhe

I finished Doc Sidhe, by Aaron Allston, tonight. It was a fun ‘pulp fiction’ kind of story. A down-on-his-luck kickboxer gets transported to the FaeWorld (my term, not his) and he and his girlfriend get embroiled in a battle against an evil madman. The other world is whimsical but believable; people there are poisoned/burned by the touch of iron or steel, so most of their technology is based on copper and so forth, which has retarded their technological growth when compared to ours (they call our world the grimworld). But they have magic, so you end up with almost a steam-punk kind of land, but not so gritty as what you might think of when you think of steampunk.

Anyway, the book won’t win any awards for Classic Fiction or The Great American Novel, but it was a darned fun read and an imaginative enough story. And though I’ve linked to it at Amazon, you can d/l it for free (or read it online) at Baen’s Free Library. I read the whole thing on my PDA while waiting in lines or during solo meals and what not. Not a bad way to pass some time.

Newsreader news

Because I’m nothing if not fickle, I’ve stopped using AmphetaDesk as my newsreader. Yes, I know I raved about it, and I still think its pretty sweet software, and works across operating systems to boot.

But now I’ve become a NewNewsWire Lite fan. Its Mac OS X only though. But its still free, and it offers both a traditional 3-pane view of your feeds as well as a ‘pop-up’ listing from the dock, a la Slashdock (which is also a great free OS X newsreader, but isn’t really conducive to casual browsing of feeds).

Actually this isn’t as strange a reversal as it might seem, as I liked NetNewsWire a lot when I first tried it, but it costs a fair amount of coin ($40). I never noticed the free “lite” version before (scroll all the way down the page). Thanks to Elaine for pointing it out…

NetNewsWire Lite
(Click for full-sized image)