Wine and Beer related sites

• Hubey Plummer's home page. Hubey is a serious beer fanatic, so if you're looking to learn more about fine beer, check out his page as a jumping off point!
• Looking to learn more about Australian wine? Check out the Australian Wine Centre.
• Bob Back is another good friend who runs the wine department at Evanston 1st liquors. His store has a nice site with some good information, even if you aren't in the neighborhood to buy wine.

Online Foods

• King Arthur's Flour has some of the best bread flour available. Their catalog has tons of great baking equipment and supplies. Check out their terrific cinnamon chips -- a mix of these and chocolate chips makes a wonderful cookie!
• If you're looking for good spices, check out Penzey's Spices. The spices from Penzey's are nearly the same cost as what you get in the store, but the quality is stunningly better.
• Zingerman's has a wide range of gourmet foods, baked goods and cooking supplies. Their prices are shocking, but the quality's top notch. I highly recommend their truffle oil and their cheeses.

Coffee Sites

• CoffeeKid.com is a great resource for serious coffee fanatics. Good tips, but more importantly lots of equipment reviews from folks who have been using the stuff for some time.
• Are you interested in roasting your own coffee at home? It's a heck of a lot cheaper and orders of magnitude better than anything you'll buy in a local store. SweetMarias.com is probably the Web's best resource for folks who are interested in roasting their own coffee beans at home. Very good equipment, very good information, and a wonderful selection of green coffee beans.
• Barry Jarrett at Riley's Coffee and Fudge has some of the best roasted coffee available from the Internet. His Yemen Mocha is what got me interested in better coffee. Barry also sells a wide range of coffee equipment. You'll notice "Fudge" in the title of his business. Be sure to check out their *wonderful* fudges. The caramel and mint are two of my favorites.

Other Odds and Ends

• Powell's Book Center is a terrific web resource for ordering books.  They've got a ton of used books (cheap!) available through their online-searchable site. I've used them quite a few times and am a very happy customer!
• Bookpool.com is a wonderful site to get computer-geek type books from.  I've saved hundreds of dollars over the last year and love this site.
• Bestbookbuys.com is an online comparison service.  Type in a title or ISBN and the site will compare prices (including shipping) and show you where the cheapest bargains are.  A great service!
• PAWS (the Progressive Animal Welfare Society) is a Seattle-based organization that works with fostering animals and is involved in other areas of animal advocacy. I may not agree with all the things they promote, but I surely support their adoption and fostering areas! Check out their web site if you're in the Puget sound area and are looking for an animal-friendly apartment -- they've got a list of over 350 apartment complexes which allow pets.
• Interested in adopting a greyhound?  They're great dogs with wonderful, gentle personalities.  No, they don't tear around your house constantly looking to chase anything that moves.  Take a look at a site with more information about this wonderful breed. (We don't have a greyhound yet, but we'll be adopting one soon after we relocate out of our tiny townhouse!)
• If you're interested in helping to find out if there's life elsewhere in the universe, check out SETI@Home. You can download software which processes chunks of data for the Search for Extra Terrestrial Inteligence. All this is done in the 'background' while your system's idle, so you don't notice any degredation. Software's available for just about any hardware and operating system platform you can think about. The screen saver version for Win95/98/NT has a neat graphical display, but those fancy graphics really drag down performance. Use the command-line version if you want faster processing.




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