Almost a year ago, I was given a second-hand home coffee roaster. It’s about the size of a Mr. Coffee coffee machine and can roast in a number of different styles. I’ve only taken it out of the box once, just to look at when I first got it. I lived in the second floor of a crowded apartment building then, and as much as I Iike the smell of fresh-roasted coffee, I felt uncomfortable subjecting my neighbors to the same. I was already on thin ice with my downstairs neighbors who slept all day and worked all night (Will ya quit pounding on the ceiling already? I’m only walking for crissakes! Get a day job!). Of course, with my new country home, that’s not an issue anymore so I dug out the old roaster again. Now, unroasted coffee beans aren’t the easiest things to find, but Athens is blessed with a wonderful roasting company who gets tons of beans imported regularly from all over the world. Jittery Joe’s is a good thing, let me tell you. They’ve got a few of their own coffee shops and they supply beans to many, many businesses around here, including one who brews a stout beer with the beans. I bought a pound each of Cameroon and Tanzanian peaberry beans to try. I’ll let you know how it works out. The master roaster at Joe’s told me the best resource for home roasters is Kenneth David’s book Home Coffee Roasting (available at Amazon or your favorite book store and abridged on-line here). If you’d like to get into coffee roasting yourself, you can buy a roaster for a hundred (or hundreds of) dollars, but the book has a section on how to do a perfectly wonderful job with a hot air popcorn popper like the one in the back of your cabinet or available at the yard sale down the street next weekend for 25 cents. Jittery Joe’s is selling me my choice of bean for only $4 a pound, saving me up to $10 a pound over roasted premium coffees. If you don’t have your own local Joe, there’s a few places online you can order from (though not as cheaply).

Have you called the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp (the makers of Kool & Lucky Strike) lately? If you haven’t, you should. 1-800-578-7453. They’ve gone from goofy to insane, I think.

Three planets and the moon appear to align this week in a preview of the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it alignment next month. Better step outside and take a view while you still can!

This little site I found from Riothero amused me greatly: catbuttsmallhead. In an old documentary about R.E.M., Michael Stipe said he wanted to name the band “Cat Butt”, but the other guys wouldn’t go along. My college buddy Matt Goolsby (wherefor art thou, Matt?) was a total R.E.M. freak and started using that phrase all the time. All. The. Time. So of course it entered into the rest of our vocabularies as well. Cat butt! So now here’s this site, which features only those four words in a clicky-draggy environment. Why? Who knows. But it made me think of my days at Tech, and that’s always a good thing. Cat butt!

In light of yesterday’s Microsoft verdict, I remind you of James Gleick’s proposal to turn Microsoft into triplets. His is the best idea I’ve heard yet on breaking up the company.

Poor Clio is a new weblog begun by James Edmunds in New Iberia, Louisiana. He sent me an interesting email after reading an entry here a while back, so he’s already got a big plus from me. So far, he’s off to a good start. “I’d like to post daily, and hope I don’t post weakly. "

The long-promised virtual tour of my house is complete. It features both a first-person walkthrough and a clickable floorplan. If this interests you, begin your tour here. Coming up next: a highly referenced annotated HTMLization of my garden. Why? Um… well… some people say information wants to be free. The information about my garden wants to be free and on the web. And if that’s what it wants, I’m happy to oblige. Plus, it’s a great way to teach myself a few web authoring tricks.

I waxed my cheese yesterday. No, that’s not a euphemism for some unspeakable act. I literally waxed the homemade gouda cheese that’s been drying in my pantry for the last three weeks. I also bought a black plastic compost bin for cheap from my county recycling department. So, on top of making bread and cheese and so-on, I’m also making dirt. My tomatoes will love me.

TLCNet is the Transportation for Livable Communities Network. Their site has some nice community-oriented resources, including the full text of publications available for download or online reading.

Project Censored has released it’s annual list of the top 25 news stories that didn’t get picked up by the mainstream press in the last year. It turns out I’d read most all of these before now, and nearly all because I’d seen pointers in various weblogs (most notably Robot Wisdom). One more sign (in my mind, anyway) that weblogs are a powerful force, even if every other link is about making cheese.