About me

No, this is not me. I (still) have hair.

I bought my first cigar on a vacation in Vienna in the summer of 2008. All I remember is that it was a Macanudo but it must have been good because one year later, I was already thinking about developing my own rating system. 

The cigar profiling method is based on the decision making algorithms found in project selection software. As a project management consultant, I often had clients who wanted to implement such software before they had their basic project management processes up and running. I saw too many implementations go wrong and decided to develop an Excel-based solution in an effort to postpone implementing complex software as long as possible

From the beginning of my cigar smoking hobby, I participated in online cigar forums. If you track my posts, you can see the method develop. But creating and posting reviews is quite a hassle. Taking notes during smoking, writing the review, uploading pictures to a hosting site, copying the links from the photos back to the review, posting the review on the forum, applying formatting – did I miss anything?

In the fall of 2012, I started reviewing cigars on Twitter (@cigarprofiler). That took care of the photo hosting problem but there was no easy way to harvest the tweets and post them as a review on a forum. I started collecting them on a blog using Twitter’s built-in embedding option. While this saved me a lot of time, it also meant I would no longer contribute reviews to the community. 

So when I started thinking about this project, I knew I not only wanted to make creating, but also sharing reviews fun and easy by providing phpBB and HTML formats to forum users. Knowing that most of these forums are run by volunteers who crave reviews and other quality content, cigarprofiler.org will never have a forum of its own. I want to support the online community, not compete with it. 

My favorite cigar store, Van de Loosdrecht voor Genietend Roken in Veenendaal, Netherlands.

Another category I don’t want to compete with, is cigar retailers. Nothing cigar-related will ever be sold on cigarprofiler.org. Many inner cities are struggling, both with the economy and with internet sales. Too many consumers go to brick & mortar stores to get information and then go home and buy online. I want to turn this around. I want my site to be a free information source but if you want to buy cigars, please go out and support your local retailer.

Being old-fashioned (or, as my kids insist, “just old”), I don’t openly share personal details about myself on the internet. If you want to get in touch, just drop me a line at asigarie@gmail.com and ask me anything.