Woe, Woe and More Woe

One of the problems with being an artist today is the mastering of all of the various tools you have to master to get your work done.


Just think of how easy it was for Michelangelo or Vinnie the Go, they got up, ate breakfast, pulled out a canvas and went to work. Okay, maybe ole Mikey had to grind his own paints but that’s nothing compared to the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into now.

Sure you can still do the primitive art thingy, paint, sculpt, pot or carve, but then you have to consider how you are going to show, promote, sell, advertise, display, network all of the wonderful things you have made.

And if you successfully manage that rocky shore then there’s what to do with all of the social networking sites.

Okay, okay so I have been dismissive of social networking and I still am, but the truth is there are folks out there who do c are and who are looking and you, Mr. or Mrs. or Ms. Artist have to be able to deal with them and all of their social mocial stuff.

Here’s the thing, employers are looking. Now I know you are a successful artist and will never be nine to five straight again, but you will have to promote your work and instead of employers think gallery owners and agents. They are looking at all of the social media and judging you on just how well you fit in and how much computer elbow rubbni8ng you are doing.

There’s a site called Klout.

http://klout.com/home

It measures just how influential you are and the more clout you have the more likely you are to impress some silly gallery owner or an agent. And if like me, you have no social footprint on the Web then you are a social leper and will be forced to wear a bell and shout: “Unclean, unclean” where ever you go online.

Now do you want to live with that sort of shame?
And just how do you do all of this necessary and carefully scrutinized webbing? Why you have to use a computer. And that my artist friend is where the trouble starts.

Computers are wonderful beasts. They let you research a thousand libraries in your Dr. Denton’s, they let you fact check your locals, add interesting elements to your paintings and they let you do it without you having to leave the living room. You can even do it in the buff but that sort of thing is a story for a different kind of Blog.

So computers are wonderful and necessary but Lord, how they can drive you stark, staring mad.

Take today, I was doing my Tuesday maintenance, cause the Long Sufferin works at the museum and I can clean up my computer while I use her computer cause we don’t share

a computer cause I go everywhere on the Net and do a lot of stuff and I might just pick

up a virus or two even though I don’t go to THOSE sites and don’t ever download songs or movies or do any of the other gajillion things that can lead to picking up a nasty computer social disease and so if she isn’t there I can do two computers at once and while I was cleaning up my computer I found two annoying little problems and was trying to put them right when I did something horribly bad.

I deleted the shortcut to System Restore.

Now if you have never had a bad bug or a nasty problem you probably don’t even know what System Restore is.

System Restore is Microcrafty’s brilliant device which lets you roll back your computer to a time when it was working right. Yeah I know, it’s such a good idea I’m surprised it didn’t come from Apple!

But there I was looking at my computer and instead of being inside the System Tools on the Accessories menu it was on the desktop. No problem, I’ll just move it back…

Except I had no idea how to do that and worse in trying I deleted it completely. Now I was in big trouble, so falling back on the old computer saying if all else fails do a restart, I did a restart.

No improvement. Now I think to check the recycle bin and there’s nothing there cause I have it set to empty or restart. Now things are looking bleak.

Four hours of searching and trying things which didn’t work and I’m no better off. Okay, the two problems which started the whole thing, not being able to get Defrager to work and having an extra window pop open in my search engine, those got fixed. I got rid of the extra window by carefully checking the browser options and I just gave up on Windows Defragger and downloaded Piriform’s Defragger and am much happier than I would have been if I had gotten Windows Defragger to work.

I tried to do a System Restore but it hung and they tell me that an incomplete restore is a bad thing so I had to undo the restore I started and now I’m in really big trouble, I can’t restore and I don’t have a shortcut for restore and I have an incomplete restore.

But late in the day I found a partial solution and I’m passing it along to you so you don’t have to fumble about like I did.

On the desktop in an empty space right click, and when the popup opens select New.

When the New window opens select shortcut.

In the new window type the following exactly

%SYSTEMROOT%\System32\restore\rstrui.exe

When the next window comes up it will ask you to name thi9s shortcut and offer System as a name. I wouldn’t. It can get confusing when you actually need to find the system. Name it System Restore and hit enter/finish

Now you should have on your desktop a shortcut called System Restore. Open System Tools and right click and select Explorer. Drag your new shortcut into the Explorer Window and close it and you are done, System Restore back where it belongs and all’s right with the world.

And that means you can go back to the painting, sculpting, potting or carving and leave all of the computers alone. Now aren’t you glad it happened to me?