Attack of the WeeMee

Sample WeeMee (NO...not me)!



I was having technical difficulties and it’s all because I got carried away with something that’s called a WeeMee. You are probably way ahead of me on what this is since I don’t have tendencies toward knowing the newest “in” thing in technologies as it hits the airwaves. Well, we used to say airwaves, I can’t think what it would be called now (oh yeah, cyberspace). It’s my age, I know, I was reminded of that the other day when a very young programmer was amazed when I told him www. stood for World Wide Web. He had no idea. Yeah, really. I think I was more amazed he didn’t know than him finding out it meant anything.

But in case you are as far behind as me, a WeeMee is a cartoon-like character that you create and build on line to look like you with items like hair style, clothes, shoes, etc. Then it can be posted in your profile picture for your chat window or some such. I thought it was interesting and had some time and thought why not. I took it as a challenge to see if I could get it to look anything like me.

Okay, I clicked the create button and started my build. It seemed kind of neat, cool. I have all these options for hair…scroll through pick the style that is closest to my own. No, not that one, too much hair across the face, I do that some but not that much. Too long, ah…there. Change the color a bit. Hey! Not too far off. Look at all the other options…eyes, lip color, tops, bottoms. It’s like styling myself without having to change and try on all the different clothes. I was getting into it. I should have known something would turn wrong since there was only one pair of heels out of all the different shoes to choose from. I had no choice but to pick the only pair it offered. Then it was complete…hit finish. It kind of looks like me!

But then, uh oh. I didn’t realize it would put that silly picture everywhere! I hadn’t clicked anything to do that! Now the cartoon was on my email and chat box and oh no, what! I can’t have that there, everywhere. So I look for the edit/delete button to get rid of it. There isn’t one! So I check help and it turns out you have to download the newest version of their nifty desktop to get an edit/delete button for this picture. Great…I install it. I hope for the best – updated versions aren’t all that bad. This one was. Everything was inside one window…nothing seemed to undock, favorites were nowhere. That’s okay I thought, I’ll give it some time, I’ll get used to it. The important thing was that I was able to get rid of my cartoon self…the vicious WeeMee.

Next day I go to boot up, log in and the laptop is behaving badly. Nothing has frozen up but it’s hemming and hawing and I can open this or that but not completely. I can almost hear the two versions of this desktop software fighting with one another. The old and the new versions were definitely at odds with one another. I close out windows, try again, log off, reboot, but still the whirring and bickering. Gads. Okay, enough…I uninstall the new version and hope for the best. It worked. Back to normal. No cartoon version of myself anywhere to be seen and I can dock and undock all my applications the way I like to and my favorites are back to where they should be. Whew!

Serves me right, I guess. I should have known better than to be playing with on-line paper dolls at my age.

TT