She is one lucky lady.
Archive for ◊ 2009 ◊
14
Dec
2009
Free Christmas Music to get you in the Christmas Spirit
We are in the Christmas spirit here at the Crews house. Since all of our Christmas decorations are still in storage, we had to improvise. I set the budget at $5 and got quite the fake tree from Goodwill. I’ll have to post a picture soon.
Since I was out of budget after the thrift store tree, I had to find free Christmas music to bring me yuletide cheer. Sure there’s Pandora.com and Lala.com, but what if you’re not connected to the internet? What if you want to have a holly jolly Christmas in your car or other non-internet privileged location?
Well, I have a couple of great little treats for you.
First, you can own my personal favorite Christmas song. Click here and download “I Celebrate the Day (Album Version)” by Relient K for FREE from Amazon MP3. There are 27 others there too. If you want them, get them all. There are a couple other good ones on that list too. If you like that Relient K track, you should download “Silent Night” from that same CD…they go together quite nicely.
Then, you can own my second favorite Christmas song. Click here and download “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear” by MercyMe for FREE from Amazon MP3. If you like this song, you should get the album. It’s so good.
Also, if you’re the iTunes type, be sure to get the iTunes Holiday Sampler. Click here to have iTunes open up so you can download it. It has tracks from Rascal Flatts, Lady Antebellum, Weezer, and Stephen Colbert. Yes, I said Stephen Colbert.
So there you have it. Two phenomenal and 47 adequate free Christmas songs. Don’t wait. I have no idea how long they’ll be free. They’re free right now, so go get them! Merry Christmas!
01
Dec
2009
Lala.com is my new favorite music site.
If you’ve poked around here before, you may remember that I blogged about how I love Pandora for listening to great music and finding new music I didn’t know I liked. Hopefully you’re enjoying it–the variety is especially nice for Christmas music.
I have a new favorite music site that you need to know about if you don’t already.
Lala.com is a new site that, similar to Amazon.com and iTunes and a handful of others, has pretty much every song you could imagine. But here’s the killer feature: Once you create an account, you can have 1 full listen through of ANY SONG for free. So say, for example, that I told you “Needle in a Haystack Life” by Switchfoot was a great new song that you should download. Or that I said I loved the new Switchfoot CD, Hello Hurricane, and that you should check it out. You would create an account at Lala.com, search for Switchfoot, find it and listen to it. You could listen to one song, or the whole CD. It’s very easy to use. After you use up your free full listen-through, Lala.com automatically reverts to playing you 30 second clips. You can then do one of three things. You can 1) buy the CD or 2) buy the mp3 download or 3) for usually around a dollar, you can buy the ability to listen to the album on Lala.com as much as you want. Personally, I’d still buy the music on Amazon.com or iTunes…or maybe buy Lala.com’s mp3 download if the price was right (or 4) realize it was a bad choice, and save your money).
But here’s the other killer feature: Lala.com makes a free program you can download to your computer that scans your library and sends that information back to the server. It automatically ‘unlocks’ your personal music library for unlimited play on lala.com. Here is why this is great: Say that you have a lot of mp3s on your home computer, but you’d like access to all of them from another computer…at work, on campus, at a friend’s house, etc. This gives you the ability to listen to your entire personal collection of music on any internet-connected computer! I tested it out and found a couple of neat additional things: first, it synced all my iTunes data–playlists, ratings, play count, etc. Also, it synced my whole collection. Whether I bought it on iTunes, Amazon.com, or ripped it myself from a CD…it ALL made it into Lala.
Check it out and tell me what you think. When you do check it out, please click on one of the links in this post to go to Lala.com and create your account. They do give me a little ‘referral’ credit for free song plays when you do (That said, I would tell you to get an account and use this site even if they didn’t. Really. It’s that useful).
25
Nov
2009
Putting Christ back in Xmas…except that He never left
…and apparently was there from the beginning.
Last week at work, we sent out a promotional email to our database advertising some items in our online store. This is a list of people who chose to receive emails from us. Yesterday I opened up my email to find this little gem:
(It is worth noting that he downloaded a free copy of Jarrod Jones’s book 13 Ways to Ruin Your Life, and in the sign-up process volunteered his email address for RYC’s periodic emails. That’s how we got his email. He gave it to us.)
He’s referencing a coupon code that allows folks to have free shipping off their purchase. While this email is belligerent simply at face value, you really can’t appreciate the irony (or the author’s ignorance) until you see the ‘Godless’ email itself. Here’s a screenshot of part of the email:
…that’s right. You can save money on, among other things, a Bible study called JUSTLIKECHRIST. From ReachYourCity, a company with the mission of helping churches plan and execute community events so that people who don’t go to church might get to hear that Jesus died for their sins.
The ignorance is astonishing.
The real kicker, however, is based in the origin of the phrase ‘Xmas.’ I’m no Bible scholar, but I do know that Xmas was created by Christians! X is ‘Chi’, the first letter of ‘Christ’ in Greek. I found a couple of good links about it, though I’m unfamiliar with both authors. Here they are: Link 1 Link 2
Here’s a quote from one of them that pretty much sums it up.
“You see, the X in Xmas did not originate as our English alphabet’s X but as the symbol X in the Greek alphabet, called Chi, with a hard ch. The Greek Chi or X is the first letter in the Greek word Christos. Eric G. Gration claims that as early as the first century the X was used as Christ’s initial. Certainly through church history we can trace this usage. In many manuscripts of the New Testament, X abbreviates Christos (Xristos). In ancient Christian art X and XR (Chi Ro–the first two letters in Greek of Christos abbreviate his name. We find that this practice entered the Old English language as early as AD 100. Moreover, Wycliff and other devout believers used X as an abbreviation for Christ. Were they trying to take Christ away and substitute an unknown quantity? The idea is preposterous.”
So as the “Christmas season” gets ready to start, maybe we Christians can be a little less irritated about marketing departments and a little more irritated that people around the world are starving, sick, and dying.
20
Nov
2009
5 Years ago today…
…we got engaged!
It happened in Greenville, SC not too far from where I grew up. I was taking Lyndsay to visit for the weekend and had the perfect plan worked up in my mind. It involved going to a park that I used to like visiting when I was in high school. At the park, I was going to have a plaque made to look like a little memorial that said “At this place, Scott Crews proposed to Lyndsay Franklin, November 11, 2004.” I had the plan all set up…and then my friends Matt and Blair called me to tell me that since leaving for college, the park had been closed and turned into a giant dirt pile.
So…I needed a new park. Luckily there was a really nice new park downtown. We set everything up and pulled it off quite nicely. Matt and Blair had my camera and videotaped the whole thing.
Also, one of them had my digital camera and took some great pictures of us. This one is still the background on my laptop screen:
Thank you, Lyndsay, for deciding to say ‘Yes’ to marrying me five years ago today!
18
Nov
2009
Do you smell something burning?
If you have Lyndsay’s phone number, call her today. When she answers the phone, say hello and ask, “Do you smell something burning?” When she says no, stay ‘in character’ and just start asking similar questions (like, “Really? Maybe it’s just me.” “Are you sure you don’t smell anything?” “I started smelling it late yesterday evening…I mean, are you sure you don’t smell something?”).
She forbade me to blog about the story. But if you can get it out of her, it is pure gold.
…but you didn’t hear that from me. :)
(Best time to call is between 6 and 9 PM tonight)
16
Nov
2009
Gross!
We’ve moved houses a couple times recently since we sold our house. Most recently we moved into an older house that we’re subletting through the end of the year. It is in a great neighborhood near Vanderbilt and Belmont.
It is an older house. It has “old house” quirks about it that I forgot existed after living in our new townhouse for a few years. The first was an “old house” smell. It smelled terrible when we got here. We’ve been lighting candles and opening windows, but it still smells musty in here. Suggestions are welcome.
The second quirk was spiders. Usually I am not afraid of spiders. I’ve killed probably a dozen during move-in and we really haven’t seen any more since then. When I went to move my clothes into the closet, I turned on the light and saw the freakiest thing EVER in the top corner of the door frame. No joke. I was scared. Though I’m not scared of a spider, apparently I am scared of a spider with 15 or so babies, all hanging out in one web.
For your enjoyment, I took a picture. I hope it makes your skin crawl too.
11
Nov
2009
MuteMath
MuteMath is a band that I like. I could play you their music and you might like it. You could watch videos of them in concert on youtube and you might like it. But regardless of any of that…you must, must, must go see them in concert. You will not be disappointed.
Sunday night they came to Nashville and I talked Lyndsay into going. We had a great time.
Funny story: Just before the concert, Lyndsay bumped into a coworker…her company’s CFO. This is a grown-up, responsible adult woman with children. And she was ecstatic about seeing MuteMath (despite my above comment that a MuteMath concert is for everyone, I wouldn’t really recommend it for folks over the age of 40). We never would have guessed it.
Photo credit: I did not take the above picture. It came from this site, and I just found the picture on flickr.
28
Oct
2009
Woodlabel Photo Makes Me Look Good.
I got to see some of the pictures last night from Matt and Liz’s Wedding earlier this month. They turned out great! Brandon Wood, the photographer, did a great job.
If you haven’t seen me in person recently then I’ll answer the question on your mind: Yes, I still look the same as I always have and no, I’m not actually this good looking. In fact, neither is Matt. So how did this picture come out this way? It’s a digital photography miracle.
Here are some more pictures from the day on Woodlabel Photo’s Blog. As you will see in the pictures, we groomsmen got to play with Nerf guns. They made the waiting around go much faster.
(Interesting Side Note: Brandon, the photographer, actually lives in Nashville and a year or so ago made a website for Jarrod Jones, a speaker/author that I work for. Small world, huh?)