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.