Help Madtown make awesome coffee (aka coffee-making tips)

[Madtown]

So I've started drinking coffee. There's a great little coffee shop right across the street, but this morning I discovered my roommates have a coffee machine that no one's been using. Instead of treking the twenty feet to the shop, I fired that bad boy up and tossed in a package of Starbucks that someone had in a drawer.

It tastes like crap. I don't know if I did something wrong with the filter, or if the machine has some settings I need to adjust (I just hit auto and it started going), or if -- the most likely reason -- the grounds were just really stale.

Anyway, tell me how to make kickass coffee, so I can do it here on rainy mornings like today. Favorite blends, cream/sugar combos, whatever. I'm a coffee noob, so I'll take any help I can get. And if this turns into an elitist coffee drinker's thread, that's fine too.