Ultimate Karaoke Winner!

After pulling the number from Random.org, the winner was comment number 11 and that comment belonged to Leslie!

I have sent Leslie an email notifying her of her winning this prize.  Thank you to all who entered this contest!

Eric

It really is all about Love

I saw this today on Tangle.com and wanted to share it with everyone. This is Chris Tomlin's new song "Love" featuring the Watoto Children's Choir.

Enjoy.
Eric

Visiting Kids in Prison

Matthew 25: 35-36 says this:

For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.

This past weekend was the Bill Glass Weekday of Champions - Youth for the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. A day in which several hundred like minded people get together to visit and share the gospel of Jesus to those who are in prison. Or in this case, juvenile detention centers. It broke my heart going to this one, and my heart continues to break just thinking about it.

I went to a center in Dallas that had 24 residents in it. (They don't call juveniles offenders or inmates here.) Kids. Some of these kids were as young as 14, some as old as 17 and the breakdown of demographics was staggering:

• Out of the 24, there was one white, 4 hispanic and the 19 black residents.
• At least 5 had one or both parents in prison.
• At least 3 had children of their own.
• There were 16 girls and 8 boys.
  

Since I have two girls of my own, I was blessed enough to be in a small group with the team leader and another older female team member, along with 4 of the female residents. As we all shared and talked, I kept thinking that my oldest is 10, and the youngest in our group was only 14. All of them talked about high school and who knew whom, and when the discussion turned to Christ and going to Heaven or Hell, they didn't know. The team lead allowed me to lead the group discussion and to make a long story short, all four girls professed to have surrendered to Christ a long time ago and wanted to rededicate their lives to Him. It was a humbling moment.

All in all it was a good day,and I think that perhaps this type of evangelism may be my calling. I am still praying about it. I will be going into training to lead Bible studies at the centers after the November weekend of champions I'll be a part of.

If you have kids, hug them today and tell them how much you love them. The kids I met this past Saturday, didn't get that kind of affection and it showed.

Please join me in praying for the kids here in the Dallas area centers, that they will grow in Christ and study and pray.

Have a blessed day.
Eric

TheKaraokeChannel.com: A Review and Giveaway!

I was asked to write a review of thekaraokechannel.com and have had time now to review the website, the karaoke kit that you can purchase for 39.95 as well as a review of the entire online karaoke interaction with my family and friends. Also, stay tuned as I will reveal below how to win one of the Karaoke kits and a months service!

I want to start off by reviewing the website itself.

The website’s main page is by itself fairly intuitive, and you will know what to launch right away. There are three main areas of interest as of this writing: Online Karaoke Community, Download Store, and Karaoke on TV. To start singing right away, you click on the Online Karaoke “Launch It Now” button.

The Online Karaoke Community page may seem somewhat intimidating to the first time user, as there are many options to choose from, but after only seven seconds of looking the page over, I could pick up on what to do. The easiest thing to do is to look at the free songs section that appears in the middle of the page and pick a song by simply clicking on it. This loads the chosen song in the page’s media player and you may now sing the song you have just chosen. It really was that easy!

The media player itself is situated at the top right corner of the page with a button labeled "Full Screen". Click that button and the media player does become a full screen player. For your singing pleasure, you have options to have the vocals to the song sung so you can sing along as well as to change the key the song is in, so that if the song is in too high a key for you, you will be able to sing the song in a key that is more natural for you. There are a couple of other options, for the microphone, webcam and lyrics as well.

Moving on to the songs, the site claims to have, at this time of writing, 5,841 songs available to choose from. I did not go through every single one of them, but there is a good selection available in almost all types of musical genres, from Country to Pop to Christian to Rap. There was a kids section of music, but I was slightly disappointed at the choices there. My daughters, ages six and ten loved this website and hardware to go along with it, but did not like the choices in the children's music category saying that the songs were not what they listened to mostly. They are hoping that more up to date songs will be added soon.

To be honest, the site does have songs by the Jonas Brothers, but we did not find anything by Hannah Montana, or other popular pre-teen and teen stars that my daughters normally listen to. As for adults, there are songs galore. I had no problem finding songs to sing along to, nor did my wife. I had several people over to try this out at a party, as a further test of the capabilities of this site and equipment and it passed with flying colors as everyone found music and had fun singing.

The only complaint that I have about this site is the lack of parental controls. My daughters are both web savvy even at their age and not only can navigate the web, but have favorite, kid-friendly sites they like going to. They had no problem navigating this site, and I would have no problem with them being alone on this site, with one exception: there is no way to turn off certain genres of music, or have certain songs not play or show up in the lists available to the user. So the best a parent could do for this situation is to have fun with your children and be on this site with them. There may not be parental controls, but you can turn that into a positive by spending the time with your children singing along together. That way, the parent can watch what is being sung or seen.

As far as pricing goes for this service, there are four alternatives:

1. A free trial offer which will net you 250 songs to use with the remainder of the songs being 30 second samples. This offer does not have a time limit on it and is not ad free.
2. The Rising Star which is 9.95 a month with a minimum purchase of two months nets you the availability of all of the songs to sing to.
   
3. The Shining Star, which is a daily plan is 14.95 per day, and is geared mostly to those hosting a party and only want the service for the party.
4. The Superstar, which is a yearly purchased plan for 99.95 is the best bargain of the bunch.
   

The last 3 plans are all ad free when purchased. There is an optional Karaoke Kit available for purchase under the first 3 plans for 39.95 and the kit does come free with the yearly plan.

The next thing I would like to review is the optional Karaoke Kit that is available for purchase or comes free with the yearly purchased membership.

The kit comes comes with a USB vocal mixer and two microphones as seen in the pictures below.

Assembly was rather simple, as you plug the mixer into a USB port on your computer, unplug your speakers from your computer and plug the audio jack you just unplugged into the black female plug that is attached to the mixer, you then attach the audio plug from the mixer into your computers output audio jack (The one you would connect your headphones into.), then plug the microphones into the mixer, turn up the volume and select the song you wish to sing. This was so simple, my ten year old daughter had it figured out when I unplugged everthing and left the room.

The microphones did have a professional feel to them and did not break or become damaged when dropped onto the floor during the karaoke party we hosted. The mixer's controls were easy to use and labeled nicely. The sound quality from the entire setup had a very good professional feel to it. During the party we hosted, there was not a complaint about the volume, nor quality and several of my friends expressed interest in purchasing this for themselves.

Overall, thekaraokechannel.com has something very nice going for it and I do recommend it to my friends and family members, as well as to those of you who read this review. Except for the lack of parental controls, I believe this to be a family fun and family friendly website and I give it 4 out of 5 mice.

Now for even more exciting news, the staff at thekaraokechannel.com have graciously given me an extra Karaoke Kit to give away, along with a free month's subscription to their online karaoke service!

This is a fantastic opportunity to have fun with your kids, family members and friends. All you will need to do to enter is to visit Karaoke Channel Online browse through their song list (in the download store) and leave a comment on this post letting me know what song is your favorite.  Please make sure I have away to contact you!!

To gain extra entries:

1. Follow this blog or any of my other blogs, just leave a comment with the blog you are following.

(1 entry for each blog you follow)

2. follow me on twitter and tweet about this giveaway, leave a comment with your twitter name

3. Blog about this giveaway, just leave a comment with a link to your post.

A winner will be chosen at random and the winner will be notified by email, so make sure all comments have an email! This giveaway will end on July 26th at Midnight and a winner will be drawn the 27th. The winner will have 48 hours to notify me of acceptance. If the 48 hours elapse without a reply a new winner will be chosen. Also, please note that this is open to United States residents only.

Good luck!