Dickinson's store is on the ground floor of the Hastings Building on Central Avenue, next to Set Free Ministries' building, which was ravaged by fire over the weekend.
Firefighters kept the flames off the Hastings Building, but Dickinson's store and the apartments upstairs were affected by smoke and water.
About 10 tenants are still homeless, said building owner Garry Hackett. It will take repairs and the insurance company's go-ahead before they can move back in.
Mountains of Memories Scrapbooks didn't suffer extensive damage, Dickinson said. Some ceiling panels on the west side were destroyed by water, along with paper products in one section, and the smell of smoke lingers in the air. However, that minor damage might be enough to ruin her sensitive supplies, Dickinson said.
Because scrapbook supplies are meant to be in contact with irreplaceable photos and other sentimental treasures, they have to be pristine, Dickinson said. Customers pay a premium for materials that are guaranteed not to damage those one-of-a-kind items. She doesn't know if she can still make that guarantee on products that may be tinged with smoke and water.

Hobby and business

Dickinson was scrapbooking before scrapbooking was cool. She's been into the hobby for 20 years, moving to Great Falls from Cheyenne, Wyo., to buy the store from the previous owner last July.
"I just loved the area," she said.
She and her husband moved into an apartment behind the store. That's where they were — fast asleep — as flames spread through Set Free Ministries' building next door.
As it happens, the scrapbook store's previous owner is Hackett's daughter. She learned about the fire from her brother, a firefighter at Malmstrom Air Force Base, and knew Dickinson and her husband were inside.
Dickinson turned her phone down when she went to bed that night because she and her husband had just returned from Glacier National Park and were exhausted. She didn't hear the first several calls.
When the ringing phone finally woke her up, she saw the list of missed calls, and knew it was serious. She answered, and learned of the fire from Hackett's daughter.
When Dickinson gets down about the damage to her store, she reminds herself that she and her husband are lucky to be alive.
The count
Now, she's waiting to hear from her insurance company. The adjuster said her situation, with the specialized products, is unusual, so it will take a little time to make a determination on whether the goods are salvageable.
In the meantime, Dickinson has a big job ahead of her. She has to take inventory of every frame, frill, decoration and doodad in the store.
"There are 100,000 different products in here," she said. "So it's pretty intense."

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OpenEdit, Inc., developers of the most powerful, fastest and flexible open source digital asset management software, will be showcasing a major release of their Digital Asset Management software, EnterMedia at the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management Show in New York, June 1 and 2. This newest release of EnterMedia Digital Asset Management, due out June 2, has been supported in part by a Fortune 500 company using EnterMedia in an enterprise-wide, corporate environment to track, manage, share and archive digital files.

Formerly OpenEdit DAM, EnterMedia is a web based, open source digital asset management system which includes everything needed in a digital asset system such as Version Control, Related Assets, Cross Catalog Searching, Shared Albums, fast browser based Drag and Drop uploading and more. While in New York, OpenEdit will be introducing the EnterMedia Developer Community, a low-cost membership program directed toward developers and consultants interested in implementing EnterMedia digital asset management solutions. Included in the membership is the Entermedia  software product, open source code, online support and more.


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I have always been reluctant about committing the things in my life to exist on the servers of some web service. The biggest part of it I will readily admit is the generation I come from. A generation that believes in accumulating ‘stuff’. Stuff that for the most part is just physical mementos of events that have taken place in our lives. We stick them away in photo albums, scrapbooks and buried in drawers to be pulled out on the rare occasion we want to take a trip down memory lane.
Then there is just the plain old junk that human beings seem to love to accumulate around themselves. Scraps of paper with long forgotten addresses, date books from years gone by and many other types of miscellaneous crap. Much of it we have long forgotten why we kept it in the first place but even though the tugs on our memories are gone we still hold onto them.
But what happens should – god forbid – a disaster happen?
Instead of memories that we can pull out and share we have fragments of smoke seared photographs. All those cards that we held so dear have been destroyed beyond any recognition. Baby pictures, wedding pictures, photos of family gatherings, our children’s first drawing, their first report cards – all destroyed.
At what point does a cranky old fart’s desire to be able to hold physical things transform to understanding that any reluctance to transform those things into digital form is actually endangering the live of those memories. There comes a point where one has to realize that as much as we may have a feeling of trepidation at moving those memories to a digital format, we also have to realize that is the one way to keep those memories safe.
I hadn’t really thought about this idea of digitizing one’s life as being a way to keep it safe until I read a post on Computerworld by Mike Elgan where he shared his move to committing his family’s memories to a digital format. While Mike was chronicling his digitizing of his family’ memories because of his desire to move to more of a semi-nomadic life he also touched on the loss of those physical representation of memories.

When it comes to deciding whether to keep or discard something, where do you draw the line? Old holiday and birthday cards? OK, those can be discarded. Mother’s day cards from kids? Hmmm. Trophies? Yikes! There are a million items that make you feel a loss when you toss, but if you keep them, they’ll be buried unseen for decades.
It’s these same items that are irreplaceable after an unexpected fire, flood, hurricane or other regional or personal disaster.

I might not being going down the same path or have the same reason that Mike did but the end point is the same – protecting those valuable memories. Protecting them in case some disaster hits and those memories only exist in a tired old brain. Mike gives a great breakdown of how best to go about digitizing your memories and I thank him for that.
How safe are your memories? Would they survive a fire or make it through unscathed from a flood?

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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave his take on the economy and how his company is responding to the downturn at the All Things Digital Conference.

"People generally agree this is a different recession," Ballmer said. "To think that things would be back in a year seems naive to me." He said Microsoft had a "gut check," and "flattened out the cost basis," which means cutting back on what he called the "future project investment stream." Microsoft still spends $9 billion in research and development. "We can still do a lot with $9 billion, but we'll do less new things," Ballmer said.

Ballmer also introduced Bing, Microsoft's latest attempt to take on Google and Yahoo in the search area. According to a poll by Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, 54 percent of those survey preferred Google, followed by Yahoo at 22 percent and Microsoft at 8 percent.

"We flailed with Windows a lot of years before we got it right," Ballmer said, and added that it will be the same for search.

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Philippe Kahn's history of entrepreneurship is nearly as old as the PC itself. He developed software for the Micral N, one of the earliest commercial personal computers, back in 1973. As CEO of Borland Software Corp. (BORL), he touted himself the "barbarian" of the software industry and embraced that identity by holding one of the first press conferences for his company in a McDonald's restaurant in Las Vegas during Comdex. Ousted from Borland in 1995, Kahn went on to found wireless synchronization outfit Starfish Software, which he sold to Motorola Inc. (MOT). He followed that up with LightSurf Technologies, a picture- messaging company acquired by Verisign Inc. (VRSN) in 2005. Today Philippe Kahn is CEO of Fullpower, a company developing accelerometer-based hardware and software.
Walt and Kara welcome Kahn to the stage.
- Fullpower, says Kahn, has developed the MotionX Recognition Engine, a technology intended to do for motion and gesture what speech recognition did for speech. "We've created a system that studies how you move as opposed to reacting to it."
- The first demo involves a headset with on-board motion sensing. "Basically what we've done is build a motion-sensing headset," says Kahn. The headset will differentiate between the sources of motion of its user - if the user is walking, or running for example.
- Kahn calls a colleague wearing the headset onstage. Colleague begins walking and then running around the stage. The headset tracks the users speed and distance and the user can tap it for spoken updates about his or her progress.

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Scrapbooking enthusiasts are notorious for collecting the tools of the trade — colored paper, stencils, stickers, glitter — then failing to put them to use.

"Now, not only are they overwhelmed with their pictures, they are overwhelmed with stuff. They're overwhelmed by the whole hobby," said Paula Wessells, the Vancouver-based CEO of Big Picture Scrapbooking, "What really sets us apart is that we are about the process. We're not about the end product."

That business strategy of helping people connect with what's meaningful in their lives, along with classes priced as low as $10, has enabled Big Picture Scrapbooking to thrive, even in the economic downturn.

The privately held company does not disclose financial information. But Wessells said other than a dip in sales in February, the company's revenue has held steady.

Big Picture Scrapbooking, founded in 2005, was first to offer online classes. Now 31,000 students download classes.

Wessells first met company founder Stacy Julian, a Spokane resident, at a Portland scrapbooking store. She was founding editor of Simple Scrapbooks magazine.

"A year later, she called with a wild business idea," Wessells said. "She wanted to spread her passion for documenting life."

Julian had already been teaching live, in-person classes, which gave the students 90 minutes of inspiration.

"We had to come up with a way — a new delivery method — to continually inspire women," Wessells said. The Web provided that new method.

Julian is the business' creative force. A third partner, Kayce Rehn, also of Spokane, keeps the Web site running smoothly. That's leaves Wessells to handle the business side from her office in the Vancouver home she shares with her husband and three miniature dachshunds.

In addition, the company employs four people — all stay-at-home moms, Wessells said. The company's 58 contract teachers are scattered around the country.

Personal goals
Big Picture Scrapbooking classes include "Wellness Journey," an eight-week course to create a scrapbook to help people achieve personal health goals, and "Everyone Can Write A Little," which incorporates Twitter and Facebook entries.

Wessells, 40, said she has always relished scrapbooking. Before the hobby became her business, the 1987 graduate of Mountain View High School worked for marketing and events agencies in Portland.

Although digital scrapbooking is a trend the company is heeding by securing a partnership with Shutterfly, most classes focus on traditional methods involving photos, not digital files.

Wessells said that's her preference for her own scrapbooks.

"I spend 10 hours a day on the computer. The last thing I want to do is go online," she said.

But the business is very much entwined with the online world, and plans to push that further.

"We're going real deep into social media," Wessells said.

Before, the company worried class content might end up scattering across the Web for free, but now the partners feel confident the class experience cannot be replicated. Big Picture Scrapbooking is working on creating an online community among the students, who are 90 percent female; 83 percent are from the United States, with the rest from more than 161 other countries.

"The women — and men — who scrapbook really want community and social networking," Wessells said. "Everything that's happening in your life, someone across the pond is experiencing the same thing."

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This kit was made with men in mind when choosing colors and patterns to start the design. With a color scheme of blue, green, mustard and red and masculine textures of denim, plaid, and argyle, the items in this kit will allow for a scrapbook page to be designed for that special man in your life--for Father's Day, a birthday, or any occasion!  


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