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Yet another cigar purchased on my day-off with the new car, Thunder by Nimish caught my eye as soon as I stepped into the humidor.  There was a card sitting by this cigar explaining that Nimish is brother to the famous cigar maker, Rocky Patel.  Apparently Thunder is Nimish's first foray into the cigar world and it took him a while to create a worth first edition.  Was it worth it?  Let's see....

First the unlit appearance:  glossy, oily, and dark, the Thunder Toro I purchased made my mouth water.  I do like the occasional maduro and this one screams "SMOKE ME".

The band is really striking too.  Heavy gold accents with a bright forest green, a color you don't see often enough in cigar labels, I think, made this one stick out among the mess of other sticks I perused.

The unlit aroma is standard maduro fare; deep tobacco sweetness with a hint of molasses and cedar.  I blazed this one up with my jet lighter thanks to that aforementioned Xenia wind.  She burned even and slowly with at least two inches of clinging ash prior to the first drop-off.

Flavors were also very typical maduro yet there was a nice sweet coffee flavor that really appealed to me.  If you are a fan of a nice rich maduro, I would highly recommend Thunder.  They are mild enough to smoke regularly and have an extremely comfortable price tag.  Looks like Nimish learned a few things from Rocky!

My old Pontiac Aztek finally died - transmission decided it'd had enough.  So, in bittersweet fashion, I traded her in on a brand new Hyundai Veloster.  Sweet little ride that gets a full 20 miles per gallon more than the old Aztek ever could.  So, like my Grandpa before me, I was walking around the new car after about three days of driving it; preening it with a microfiber cloth while puffing on my pipe.  Would you believe that I found a screw in the front driver's side tire after three days?  Fortunately, I had added road-hazard insurance to the lease….yes, I am leasing for now….anyway, I called the dealer and set up an appointment that I was sure would take a couple of hours.  What does this have to do with a cigar review?  I am getting to that….

Near the dealer is a local wine shop that typically has a nicely stocked humidor – albeit often overpriced.  I decided to treat myself with a few goodies.  Two I had never had before and one old favorite that I could not pass up.

First up was the VegaFina Sumum Edición Especial 2010.  A 5x50 robusto with a beautiful smooth Ecuadorian Cubano wrapper, this little baby just screamed “Montecristo” to me.  Heavy in the hand for the size and about a third of the price of a Montecristo, I had to try this one.

Unlit aroma was very sweet tobacco and leather.  A dual band (I had already removed the second band in the photo, sorry!) with a very elegant and simple silver design, VegaFina looks like something that might cost you $20 each.  In fact these beauties are rolled in the same Altadis factory as Montecristo!

I lit this one up with my jet lighter rather than my usual sulfurless matches….One of the downfalls of living in Xenia, Ohio….wind!  The burn was perfectly even with a nice silky white ash that clung to the body of the cigar for about two inches before it even wanted to drop.  I would rate this one at medium bodied.  It was smooth and creamy with notes of leather, earth, cedar, and a sweet tobacco undertone.

I highly recommend this cigar – in fact this one might become a resident of my own humidor if I can find a good deal on a box of them.

Oh, and the screw in the tire of my new car turned out to be a quarter-inch sheet metal screw that didn’t puncture the rubber.

I have recently started dropping into the local smoke shop here in Dayton, The Wharf, on Sunday afternoons.  One of their excellent staff members, Cory, pointed me at a new offering from Drew Estate called the Undercrown.  I have since smoked two of them.  My review follows.

Now, Cory pitched this cigar to me as a "firecracker".  I typically like strong cigars too.  I mentioned The Edge by Rocky Patel and he chuckled.  "The Undercrown makes The Edge feel like a spring breeze".  This piqued my interest so I grabbed one.  At about $8 for a Toro size, the price is not too painful. 

The unlit cigar is almost black with a heavy-in-the-hand feel and plenty of oils in the wrapper. I know some reviewers ignore the band, but presentation is a big part of cigars as far as I am concerned.  Granted I have smoked some real crappers with beautiful bands too.  The band on the undercrown is a beautifully designed dark blue with gold.  A very nice look in my opinion.

After lighting this thing up, I see what the "firecracker" statement was about.  This is easily the mightiest cigar I have ever tried....even tops the Graycliff Espresso.  The ash is consistently white with an exceptionally even burn.  The last one I smoked had about two inches of ash before I flicked it off.  Construction is perfect and the flavors are deep and rich with plenty of earth, leather, and coffee.

I do highly recommend this cigar but it comes with warnings.  Don't smoke this one on an empty stomach.  And don't go near it if you like mild cigars.  This is about as close to three rounds with Mike Tyson as anyone should ever get.

Ran into something strange this week.  I was fiddling with a CFFORM containing a richtext CFTEXTAREA.  Just as a lark, I copied an image and pasted it into the editor and the image appeared.  So far no sirens sounding.  Now, I have been doing this web stuff for 16 years and I have seen pasted images appear like this.  Typically when you submit the form the source will contain an image tag pointing a file:/// referencing the file on my own hard drive.....at least that is what I was EXPECTING to see here.

Imagine my shock when I viewed the live page and the image appeared!  Then imagine the stroke I nearly had when one of my co-workers could see the image on his screen too!!!  After hearing the Twilight Zone theme in my head, poking around the source, and contacing Ray Camden for a sanity check we discovered the image was embedded into the richtext form as a base64 encoded string - the raw image file data!

As Ray said, we can call this "A Feature" of the CFFORM richtext editor.

More tests reveal that Internet Explorer doesn't provide this "feature".  Only Firefox does so far....so I guess if Microsoft doesn't create a "feature" they won't use it.

For the past two weeks the ColdFusion scheduled tasks on one of our production servers were not running.  Odd thing is, they could all be run directly from the URL without errors.  When running them manually from the scheduled task window in ColdFusion Administrator they would process without error but not create their desired output - each task writes a text file for use with Active Directory.

After some poking around here is what I found.

I processed one of the tasks and forced it to write the output to a file.  This file showed that permissions within IIS were not working.

*twilight zone music*

The IUSR account on the server was locked.  After unlocking the account the tasks took off like a bird. 

Now I need to find out why the account was locked in the first place.  Should be more fun than a sharp stick in the eye - but only by a bit.