I would definitely recommend giving the home roasting a shot. It took me a little while to get the hang of it, using the cheap-but-primitive "fresh roast" roaster http://www.chicanecoffee.com/fresh-roast-plus-8.html .

One key tip that wasn't clear from the instructions: there's a "first crackle" and "second crackle". After about 3 minutes you'll hear a sound like popcorn popping. Don't turn it off yet. The popping will fade away for another couple of minutes. At around 6 minutes it will start crackling again, generally faster. Also, by this time, the beans should start getting a little shiny in parts. You can start the cooldown immediately and have a good roast, or let it run for another minute or two to get a dark roast.

Anyway, enjoy. I'm looking forward to roasting and brewing a nice pot of Ethiopian tomorrow.

Oh, and I do use a conical burr grinder (power, not hand). The just-roasted-ness I think has a stronger influence on the coffee flavor than most of the other input variables (e.g. hand-ground vs. machine ground). I guess it also helps that NYC tap water is very tasty (no chlorine flavor) and soft (almost no minerals)

After reading the lengthy slashdot discussion of optimal coffee-making techniques (http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/16/2123222), I took the plunge and bought not only a Chemex coffeemaker (roughly similar to the Mellita, but looks cool and uses special super-filters, http://www.chemexcoffeemaker.com/), but a coffee roaster.

Roasting your own beans turns out to be trivial (takes 6 minutes, works just like a popcorn popper), and results in awesome, ultra-fresh coffee flavor. The green beans can keep for a couple of years, unlike the roasted beans which start to lose flavor within hours.

The place I bought the roaster (chicanecoffee.com) has a deal where you can buy the roaster together with a variety pack that has a half-pound each of 16 different varieties. I'm nowhere near through it after six months.

Only downside is that darker roasts sometime set off the smoke alarm (no ventilation in my kitchen). The plus side is that everytime I roast, the entire apartment fills with the most amazing smell of roasting coffee...

I would say the primary problem at this point is that a significant percentage of Bioshock Steam purchasers are unable to play at all. The Steam servers are crawling and crashing. For some reason, despite the nearly-2GB "preload" we all did, they've decided that another half gig or so needs to be downloaded at activation time, a massive transfer they're totally unequipped to handle.

Valve has very clearly not made the necessary investment to allow Steam to handle a high profile release. I feel like a total sucker. At least I can be sure that there will never be a repeat of this ordeal. It's my friendly neighborhood retailer from now on.

And, on topic, it looks like I'll be playing it in a 4:3 box on my widescreen monitor too...

I can't even fully unlock. "Servers are too busy" to handle my request. My money spent on the Steam version appears to have been fully wasted. This is a pity -- I was thinking that I might want to purchase more Steam games, but if they're going to have a full meltdown every time there's a major release...

It is higher res, in places, although it's from the same source photos. Try seeing how far you can zoom in on Cambridge, MA in Google Earth, and compare that to Google Maps.

And of course, Google Earth has height data so you can fly through the Grand Canyon, 3D buildings in major cities, etc.

This comment was edited on Jul 17, 22:30.