I made it out of the grocery a little nervous, but alive.

I went to the Kroger grocery that is within a mile of my home tonight. The parking lot was much lighter than usual, and I got a great space easily.

Then I stepped out of the car and noticed that vans from all three of the major news channels for Nashville were set up in the parking lot.

Another customer driving by stopped and asked if I was wanting to know what was going on. Being indecisive about whether I should enter the store, I said I really did.

Seems that within that hour, a man tried to snatch a woman's purse inside the store while she shopped. Another man tried to help her, and was stabbed for his effort.

So, a warning to everyone: Keep an eye and a hand on your handbag while you are shopping. Make it seem less easy for a mugger to take your purse easily and perhaps it will make them hesitant to try. If they are reluctant to try, the less chance you or someone else will be injured.

Everyone please stay vigilant, safe and happy. God bless you all.

Jennifer Ray
http://www.jenaray.com/

Great Amazon feature!

OK, you guys may not be as happy as I am about this, but it is a feature I have longed wished for at Amazon.com. Maybe it was there and I've missed it, but I know I've looked for it before, so I think it may be fairly new - at least in the last year.

What's that? You want me to get to the point? LOL Alright, then...

See, I have a lot of pre-orders at Amazon.com and I often order items as I notice them. Many of those pre-ordered items end up releasing on the same date, and so I've had a bunch of different orders shipped separately but arriving the same day. Well, that wastes money on shipping, packing material, and is tedious to keep track of.

You don't want to delete and re-order items, because then you might end up paying a higher price due to Amazon's pre-order pricing policy which affords you the lowest price the item was ever priced at between the time you placed the order and the date it actually shipped.

They now have a function to Combine Orders! Not only does this save on shipping and reduce the number of boxes that have to be signed for on the receiving end, it makes it much easier for me to see my pre-ordered items at a glance, since it organizes items shipping on the same date by that date. Now I can easily see if I've accidentally ordered two copies of Lora Leigh's upcoming book Dawn's Awakening, or just the one. I can also see at a glance how many items to expect a charge for at once.

How do you do it? Very easily. Just log into Amazon.com, go to the Your Account area, and look in the top section titled Where's My Stuff for the link to Combine Orders. Then you are moved to an area where you can check the option box next to all of the orders you wish to combine.

I hope some of you find this as useful as I do!

Jennifer Ray
http://www.jenaray.com/

P.S. You will want to have your shipping set to ship items as soon as they come available in these orders, of course, else all of your items in that order will be held up until the last pre-ordered item is released.

Have you backed up your ebooks lately?

Have you backed up your ebooks lately? How about your digital photos & other important files?

I just burned a new backup DVD of my eBook directory, and also copied the directory to my external hard drive. I backup to the external fairly regularly, but it had been a while since I backed up to DVD media.

I also have my eBooks on the SD card for my PDA, but SD cards and the like (compact flash cards, memory sticks, USB flash drives, etc.) are volatile memory, useful for portability but not dependable for long-term backup of files.

So, when is the last time you backed up your eBooks? It is always nice to have them burned off to portable media like CDs or DVDs, just in case... I like to keep the CDs or DVDs in an alternate location. Right now that is my office at work, but one of these days I really will get a safe deposit box.

Jennifer Ray
http://www.jenaray.com/