***Disclaimer – I & Monkey is owned by a friend but the following review has no bias because of it. What I say is what I got and what I felt. 😉

Che and I have not done a lunch together is a long time now. Let me explain that. Considering that I don’t like cooking so much and Che is too busy to cook usually, we eat out a fair bit, however our eating out is more about getting the meal done (and at a cheap price) rather than eating a meal.

So, last Saturday when we headed out and contemplated a meal we would sit down and enjoy, I was all excited. A sit down meal together outside is like a date, filled with good food and quality time together. A time to unwind and rewind.

Cruising around Indiranagar we were trying to make up our minds on where to eat, when I saw I & Monkey and the decision was made. I’ve known Sathish who owns the place for years now and have lost count of the number of times I’ve have been to his first place Windsor Pub. But somehow even though I & Monkey has now been around for over a year I hadn’t made it here yet. It was time to correct the grave wrong and check out Sathish’s now not so new place. 😉

I walked in tentatively, not knowing what to expect and looking around to absorb it all. There were three seating areas to choose from, a tent type roofed room with warm light, a room with pub-ish decor and a bar and this little small space that was well lit with a dash of green. The host stepped up asking us where we would like to sit and I just looked at him unsure of my choice. He smiled and led us to the little white and green space that seemed perfect, I thought as I sat down, for a couple to have some together time.

It didn’t take us long to make up our minds about the thirst quenching drink. 😀 Please note we were spoiled for choice in the liquor menu but the cocktail section beckoned and before long Che and I had settled down with a Mohito and a Black Magic. I’d never had a Black Magic before but the description listed about 5 types of alcohol and blackcurrant juice as ingredients, and I was feeling adventurous. 😀

To go along with the drinks we choose Chilli Sambal Fish as a starter (after much discussion over the variety on offer). I’m not much of a fishy person but lately I’ve been experimenting and enjoying myself with fish. This one didn’t disappoint either, and it was so good Che and I almost came to blows over the last piece and were saved just in time by the flambe cart arriving.

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Yep, you guessed right, I was going to have a flambe. 😛 While Che ordered a T-bone steak, I chose Flambeed Beef Medallions as the main course. Watching the flambe was fun, as you can see in the video. 😀 But eating the resultant dish was way more fun. I enjoyed it immensely and polished off every bit.

To round off and complete the meal we decided to culminate it with dessert and coffee. Che had Tiramisu and an Americano while I had an Absolute Nirvana with a Cappuccino. Gawd that dessert really was Absolute Nirvana. I oohhed and aahhed my way through it, too full to eat it all and yet unable to stop until I had finished it all.

It was a lot, and I mean a lot coz Che and I sat there for a while before we managed to get up and move again. 😛 It was a meal I enjoyed in all the aspects, ambiance, service, flavour,… The food was so good we couldn’t rush through it and that meant some amazing time and conversation together. The bill was about 3,500 bucks but it was worth every penny.

I’m looking forward to another trip to I & Monkey, after all there is so much to sample yet on that menu. 😉 If you are looking for a place to unwind, catch up and eat some awesome food, I & Monkey is the place to go to, especially for lunch. 🙂

My Rating –
Ambiance – ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
Music –        ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
Food –          ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
Service –     ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷
Price –         ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷

I & Monkey – Website & Facebook

Phone – +91 80 40923656 / +91-80-40923657

Location – Indira Nagar, 12th Main

Photo Credit: Andrew Subiela on Flickr

As a reader one of my biggest pain points has always been getting more books. While growing up my biggest challenge was my limited pocket money; my budget still is my biggest challenge.

Libraries helped solve this to some extent through the years but I’ve exhausted a few and there aren’t many left. Ebooks have also helped in price and availability but nothing beats paper books. I belong to book communities like Goodreads to make more reader friends but exchanging books across countries is unfeasible. Well, you get the gist of the problem, don’t you? 😀

Then a while back I heard of Woodpie – a site that encourages the exchange of paper books. This I had to check out.

Woodpie’s main page says that it helps you explore what’s trending, what your friends are reading, find rare books you’re looking for and even make real friends.

Here’s what you get when you login. I’ve filled in a bit of my profile, added some books and a review to see how the site works.

So, How does it work?

As a new user after setting up your profile, the first thing to do would be to add books to your shelf. When adding books you get two options – shelf and wishlist. In both cases you can choose who your book is visible to by adding circles and specific friends names. The shelf option also allows you to mark the book as read, reading or will read.
Circles here work just like on Google+. You categorise your friends into circles that you can then use to share relevant books.

Challenges –

I couldn’t find an invite friend option, and that would have been helpful to reach out to my friends on G+, Facebook and Twitter.
I would have loved an import G+ circles option, since it’s circles here too.

Plus –

Choosing circles and friends gives me privacy control over each book and I like that. No everyone needs to know what books I have and read. 😀

Library

Your library (separate from shelf) is a collection of books your friends have shared with you and all the books members have shared publicly. Basically these are the books that are accessible to you.

If it’s a book you want, you can request it from the main library page. Clicking on the request button gives you a list of people who own the book and options in the mode of exchange.

Clicking on the book takes you to a page with more details on the book, user ratings, reviews and a list of people who have the book. If its a book from your shelf you’ll also see a list of people who want the book and offer it to them with a click of a button.

Challenges –

The book details page does not have a request book button. To request a book you have to come back to the main library page.

Requests

We saw one way to request for books above but you can also request for books directly from on your wishlist. Aside from that there is also a page for all requests, where both sent and received requests can be tracked.

Matches

This is a interesting feature to me as it compares my shelf and wishlist against that of my friends and public and gives me a list of books I can share or borrow. Simply put I can see who owns books on my wishlist and request for them easily. I can also find people to pass a book onto after I’ve read it.

Plus –

It’s a great way to make new friends, share books, and save paper and save money.

Offers

The offers section works just like requests. You can track all your sent and received offers. You can also recall/cancel an offer.

Trends

This section gives you a snapshot of the most active books and members.

My Thoughts –

‘ + + + ‘

On the whole I like the idea and site. I have a lot of books on my bookshelf I’d like to share and Woodpie lets me do just that with relative ease. It also helps me find books I want to read without having to buy them. And all of this helps me make actual new friends and widen my reader circle. This is good stuff.

‘ – – – ‘

That said, the site still has a long way to go. There isn’t a large base of members yet, and that means that there isn’t a large variety of books to choose from. The probability of finding books from your wishlist on people’s shelves is currently quite small. I couldn’t find anyone to borrow Chanakya’s Chant from and that’s a fairly famous book.
The various social networks used by readers are not integrated into the site. I’d like to see options to invite friends, announce book requests & offers and import book lists. Adding books would be easier if I could import a book list from Goodreads, rather than add one book at a time.

Woodpie is a great idea and if there are enough people using it, there’d be a lot of happy readers. I’m going to be watching the site to see how things go.

One question though is picking at me – In the age of ebooks, where we are seeing libraries disappear, can a paper book exchange program work?
Are you on Woodpie? What do you think of it?

Photo Credit: Tamas on Flickr

Planning for a trip is the most difficult part of a trip for me. There is just so much research and planning to be done to make sure I don’t miss out on something on the trip. Anything that would make this easier would be a god-send.

There are a lot of tools to help with this online today and I have used some of them. But, I’m always on the lookout for new ones. Here’s where MyGola comes in. MyGola claims to help you create a custom trip in 15 minutes. So, I figured I’d give it a spin.

The site offers three types of sign-in – facebook, twitter and id & pw. The twitter login didn’t work for me though and I had to refresh the page to get the twitter login to register.

Straight up you are asked to plan a trip in 15 minutes. I decided to go with Thailand. Che and I had travelled there last year and so I know a little bit about the country.

The ‘Thailand’ place-search results in a lot of package options. I can either select a listed package or filter the travel packages based on themes, dates and places. Filter it is – so I choose History and Outdoor as themes, days as 10-20 and places as N/A (my choices didn’t make any difference). Here’s the short list of 10 that I got –

One of the things Che and I didn’t get to do in Thailand was visit the hill tribes, so that’s the package I choose to explore. A 12 day Trek to hill tribe villages of Northern Thailand.

My first view of this section of the trip plan leaves me wowed. I like the idea of seeing a day map for each day, it gives me a immediate realistic understanding of distances to be travelled through the day.

Each day of the itinerary has a drop down of places to be seen. Each place when selected shows you a photo of the place and gives you details about it along with more photos and videos. All the places can be marked as either definitely or maybe going.

I quickly went through all the places and selected the ones I wanted. Some I definitely wanted to see and a couple were maybe’s. I ended up with 19 places before I clicked on the ‘See Your Plan’ option.

Here’s what the plan looks like –

The planner is quite neat. It shows the day in timeslots and I could add, move and remove places from it. I could also extend and reduce my time spent at each place.
When I tried to add a place, I got options of places near-by to choose from with details. I could also had an option to add a place that was not listed.
Clicking on each place on the planner to took me to more details about it, there was even a description right here in the block.
Like I said before the planner is neat, it gives you control over your entire trip.

Once you’ve saved the basic plan, you can invite people to edit and refine the plan. If you have questions, you can ask the experts at MyGola. And you can also download the current plan as a pdf, that looks quite handy for travel with maps and other details.

Another way to plan a trip is by using the ‘Start Planning’ option in the left column. This method works a bit differently. You enter the countries or places you want to visit, the number of days you have and the site gives you a recommendations of cities and locations to visit. Mark the ones that interest you with definitely or maybe and you’re back to the planner we saw earlier. This option is great if you don’t want to start with a package and want to plan your trip from scratch.
You can also mark places as favourites and save your plans for future use on MyGola.

My Thoughts –

‘ + + + ‘

The planner from MyGola impressed me. It’s the first planner I’ve seen that gives me so much flexibility, info and help, all in one place. I didn’t finish planning my trip in 15 minutes as promised but I did enjoy spending one hour planning it. 😀
MyGola has a good coverage of the world through tour operators. I found packages for most countries and cities I tried searching for, even those in India.
If you’re looking to plan a trip abroad or to one of the tourist destinations of India, this planner will work well for you.

‘ – – – ‘

There are some things though that were missing. I noticed that not all places had enough relevant photo and video content.
Though you can plan what you will do in each day, there are no details for in-between the days. E.g. I could plan what to do in Bangkok on day one and activities for Chiang Mai on day two but I couldn’t find a way to plan how to get to Chiang Mai from Bangkok. I wasn’t looking for tickets, but I would have liked to know the distance between places. I also would have appreciated space to add my travel details in the planner, so it would show on the pdf.
Like I said above, MyGola currently works well only for countries and touristy cities. A search for locations or lesser known places will not help much.

I’m looking forward to using MyGola to plan my next international trip. Have you used MyGola before? What do you use to help plan your holiday? Do you have any favourite websites or apps?

This review has been long over due. Initially I put it off because I wanted to try out the products for a while but then it just became simple procrastination. Sorry Neeta, I know this was promised a long time back.

I have straight hair so, like a lot of other people with straight hair I adore curly hair and perm my hair every chance I get. I know what you’re saying, it’ll cause damage to my hair and I’ll lose it all. Yeah, I know but I don’t mind being bald, I think it looks cool on me. 😀

Anyway, so we’ve established that I love and want curly hair and will do anything for it. But the perming does cause dry frizzy hair and after a while my permed hair becomes unmanageable. I also start to have a lot of hair fall. Some years back I remember using some L’Oreal product but for the life of me I can’t remember what it was now. So, I’ve been on a hunt for a while to find something that would work for my hair. Enter Neeta.

I met Neeta at a Social Media Workshop. When I complained about the trauma my hair was causing to my life she recommended her herbal conditioner and hair oil along with recipes to work magic on my hair at home. Since I was already trying out other products I figured I had nothing to lose.

I started out with just two of her products – the Herbal Hair-oil and the Jojoba Alerovera Conditioner. But over time I’ve tried her other products one at a time and now I use quite a few. Here are the products I currently use and my thoughts on them…

Herbal Hair-oil – I’ve used a lot of oils and I hate most of them for their greasy feel. But this one doesn’t feel heavy and is required in very small amounts. Works like a charm on my hair. The oil has Amla, Brahmi, Bhringraj, Triphala, Fenugreek & Hibiscus leaves to help control dandruff and hairfall, and nourish the hair, preventing split ends and dryness. I think it works!

Jojoba Aloevera Conditioner – This product took some learning. I was so used to using large amounts of conditioner that it took a while to get use to using small amounts. The conditioner makes my hair smooth, soft and NOT heavy and flat like before. And it takes so little that it lasts really long and is easy to carry on travels.

Aleovera Cucumber Gel – This gel is great for a lot of purposes. Works well on burns as it cools the skin (I’ve tried it), is great as a moisturiser and night pack and works well on hair too. I use it the most in Neeta’s Papaya Hairmask, you should try it… I love the feel of my hair afterwards.

Strawberry Aloevera Arnica Face Wash – Most facewashes don’t work on my skin, I break out into pimples soon after using them. But this facewash from Prakriti Herbals worked for me and I love it. It smells lovely and I love to go to sleep with my face smelling of it. Leaves me feel all nice and refreshed. Again brownie points for only needing a drop at each use, which means a small bottle in my handbag goes a long way and its always handy!

Lemon Handwash – This is one of the most recent products I’ve tried and I like it. Leaves my hands smelling all lemony and clean. Bought it three months ago and finally it ran out only last week. It’s time to take a trip to the Prakriti Herbals store near home I think.

Hibiscus Shampoo – Choosing a shampoo took me a while, I tried all the shampoos Neeta had to offer before I settled for the Hibicus one which suited my hair best. Like all her other products this one also doesn’t need to be used in huge amounts and yet it lathers well and cleans the hair sweaky-clean too. Brownie points for customer service and patience is helping me find my perfect shampoo.

I know I already use a lot of products but I’m looking forward to trying out new products from Neeta’s stable. They work as she says they would (as of now) and I’m happy with the results I’ve got. Her products aren’t all that expensive either, especially when you take into consideration the small quantities required.

If you’re looking for herbal products to use at home, you should check out Prakriti Herbals products. They are now available on Flipkart.com too. That said don’t take my praise to heart, I can only vouch for the products I use and how they work for me; please try them out for yourselves and do tell me what you thought of them and what products you’re using. I’ve love to hear of other great and not too expensive products I can use.

You should follow Neeta’s blog if you want more home remedies and herbals recipes.

A day after I wrote a post about asking people for what you want on Social Media, I finished reading Ginny Baird’s ‘The Sometime Bride’. Ginny’s was the first ebook in 22 ebooks I’ve read until now to ask me to engage with her explicitly.

Here’s what Ginny wrote –

A Note From the Author

Thanks for reading The Sometime Bride! I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please help other people find this book.

1. This book is lendable, so send it to a friend who you think might like it so that she (or he) can discover me, too.

Watch for my upcoming release, Real Romance, due out in May 2012!

Here’s why I think more authors should do this.

Unlike most authors Ginny told me to share her book. Most authors tell you that the book you are reading is not lendable/shareable. This makes no sense as if I bought a paper book I would share it with friends, so why can’t I do that with an ebook as freely. As an author would you consider the number of people who have read your book or would you just focus on how many people have paid for your book? Isn’t the reason we write, to be read?

After reading Ginny’s message i stopped to think about the story and characters of her book. I gave the idea of a review a definite consideration. I don’t review all the books I read so asking definitely put ‘The Sometime Bride’ on my review list. My way of paying back an author for taking the time to write a book that I enjoyed is to review the book. Reviews help authors reach out to more readers and they work as great testimonials too. If you love books help authors reach out by reviewing their book.

I considered joining her newsletter and Facebook page. But what Ginny could have done better was check for typos and add a link to her Facebook page. I would have to search for her page on Facebook and thats a deterrent; giving me a link or way to find her page would have made me take action immediately.

I wish more authors would do this, it makes authors more approachable and human compared to that vague image I have of a person bend over a typewriter as I read a book. It gets me to like the author more, want to know more about the author and her books. Most importantly it builds a community of readers for an author for future books!

I am constantly on the lookout for good social media sites and here is my latest find.

Sendible helps you to connect with your friends, family, customers and co-workers by sending all types of messages from one place – now or in the future. I took a quick look around and liked what I saw though it still can do better.

The sign-up was pretty easy and clean. Had to wait a while though for the confirmatory email. The welcome page has a listing of all the sites you can schedule on, and there are quite a few. You can post on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter among others. You can also schedule Blogs, Email and even Flickr.
Before being able to use any of the services, you will have to enter details of the networks you want to use. You can connect not only to your Facebook profile but also your Facebook pages. That’s a nice touch!

You can import your contacts from most emails services. Sendible supports Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo or you can use a .csv file. The process is simple and easy and you also have the option of selecting which contacts to import. The Address book is well spaced out and easy to navigate.

The email setup is easy to use and even lets you blind copy everyone if you are mass mailing. The Multi Message allows you to send/schedule on multiple platforms and when scheduling you can also make messages recurring to act as reminders, however the scheduler right now only lets you go upto 30 hours. Hope they soon include days, weeks and months.

The sms scheduler allows only 160 characters and lets you get all replies to your sms as an email. A great marketing tool! However you have to buy credits to use the sms feature, hence not free 🙁

Sendible seems to be the only tool I have come across recently that allows multi-social network scheduling/posting for free. (I use SocialOomph quite a bit and I hate the fact that Facebook scheduling is not free). When scheduling status updates you can include URL’s and images too!

Sendible also lets you setup reminders for yourself by email or sms. Though am not so kicked by this as I can do this on my phone or outlook as reminders anyway.

On repeat login you will get to your homepage which is quite nifty. At a glance you can see scheduled messages, tasks and birthdays. You can also send out quick emails and status messages.

Something to note is that all messages will have ads in them unless you have a Sendible Pro account. The paid service also offers an newsletter sign-up widget for your blog. The widget adds the customer data to your Sendible list and so you can schedule and send out your newsletter right from here. You can even customize your newsletter and send them to select groups.

On the whole a great social media scheduler! It caters to almost everyone’s needs.

Photo Credit – Sendible

Don't be quick to judge.

Have you ever looked back and felt stupid about your initial judgment of people or things? – I have. There have been times when I have been quick to judge without giving time or opportunity for explanation and later realized that I was wrong. I should have given the person more time before I categorized and labeled them.

Few days ago I received a nasty review of BookBuzzr. (BookBuzzr is a free Online Book Marketing Tool for Authors and I am currently promoting and marketing it). The review said the tool was no good and well a lot of other things but this post is not about justification, so am keeping the review aside.

When I first read the review I was upset, some of the things said were untrue, some true and some just quick judgments. After the initial upset I re-read the post and realized that my getting upset was silly. Here’s why. The reviewer had based his judgment on a 10 minute test and had not read the instructions at all. Now am not saying he’s not entitled to his opinion but maybe he should have delayed judgment a bit.

Am sure am not the only one who has had to face a bad review, most of us have for books, products, work, etc. So here are a few tips for the next time you are trying out, reviewing or judging something new.

1. Follow instructions – if you don’t then you have no right to say it doesn’t work.
2. Be patient – Sometimes you are asked to wait, be patient and give it time. (Especially if you are told something would take time)
3. Ask questions – if there is something you do not understand, like or feel is lacking, contact the person or company. They may have a very good reason or may be working on the issue already.
4. Give suggestions – Contact the person or company with ideas and suggestions.

The above would work for everything from products to books. And before you pass judgment you’d have given the other person a chance to have their say. This would avoid bad reviews, hurt feelings and hasty judgment.

This does not mean that you do not rate something badly but do it only after knowing the whole picture; else you might just realize later that you had made an error in judgment.

Photo Credit: FadderUri