If you know me at all, you know that these days Adobe leaves a bad taste in my mouth. See Exhibit A and Exhibit B. And those don’t even mention Adobe’s accusations that I was a liar and a cheat and the overall nightmare I experienced when I had to “crossgrade” from Windows to Mac in 2007.

It wasn’t always that way. Back in the fall of 1996 (or was it winter 1997?) I was a freshman in college and got myself a copy of The Photoshop 3.0 WOW! Book and downloaded a working demo of Photoshop 3. It was a revelation. I had so much fun playing with that software and learning what it could do. I knew Photoshop 4 was on the way so I waited and pounced as soon as it was released. I think that with my student discount I was able to pick it up for around $270. Best money I’d ever spent. If you’ll recall, PS 4 was the first one to have layers. Yes, there were three versions of Photoshop that didn’t have layers. The excitement I felt about computers and creating things with computers was palpable. I still remember it clearly.

Sadly, today, for whatever reason, those feelings are a faint trace of what they once were. Part of it is because Photoshop CS5.1 is a bloated pile of crap that makes me hate life whenever I open it. In fact, I’ve given up on it and have switched back to CS4 as I patiently wait for a CS5.1 update that will take it from “total shit” to “usable, but still buggy.” Lion’s been out for months. I’m afraid an update to CS5.1 is hoping for too much. I hate Adobe.

However, there’s more to it than Photoshop itself being less fun to use. I think it’s because I’ve forgotten how to play. You know… Playing. Just for fun. Now, sadly, I feel a tremendous amount of pressure to apply whatever skills I have to making a buck or two. Because I have rent to pay and I have food to buy. I think it would be fun to dive into 3D, which is what I originally wanted to do when I was in high school. And video editing interests me. “But Erik,” my brain says. “Why? How are you going to make money with that?”

I expected to have this kind of problem at some point in my life. I was a photography major in college, but I had no interest in being a photographer professionally. I felt like that would kill the joy I get out of making photographs. If I had to make photos I didn’t like in order to please clients, it would suck some of the joy out of photography. And if I had to worry about selling photographs as art, I would end up making photographs I thought would sell rather than photographs I personally enjoyed making and looking at. In fact, the period where I temporarily dropped out of college was the time I was most excited about photography because I was only doing it for my own personal enjoyment. I was shooting what I wanted to shoot, not for projects the instructor doled out. Also, oddly enough, those months when I was shooting on my own for no one else but myself, I learned more than I ever did while in a photo class. I’ve never gone down the road of photography as a career and even though I go through periods when I don’t touch my real camera, I still enjoy photography because the only time I make pictures is when I want to make pictures.

With programming and doing creative work on the computer, I don’t have that anymore. It all feels like work. If I’m doing work on my computer, it’s either because it’s a project I have to do or I’d better be working on something that will damn well lead to money. And that sucks. Not being able to just mess around and play sucks. A lot.

I want to recapture the joy I felt when was first learning Photoshop and when I was first learning what HTML was. When, with no knowledge of JavaScript or CSS, I dissected the source code behind the Jaguar website circa 2000 (which was pretty bad-ass at the time) and used what I learned to make a portfolio site for myself. When I could play with images in Photoshop with no real objective other than learning, having fun, and making something cool to show my friends.

But I don’t know how to get that excitement back.

Yes, this is a downer of a post. I don’t have an uplifting ending to slap onto it. I won’t until I figure out how to have fun playing with a computer again.

My local copy of the Git repo I use for a project was starting to feel a little bit slow. Now, keep in mind, this is a big, old repo that around twenty different people make dozens of commits to each day. I hadn’t done any maintenance on it since I first cloned it to my computer back in August.

Take a look at the difference in “size on disk” and the number of items. git gc --aggressive is no joke!

Related: Compressing Git Repository

Facebook is back at it again, suggesting that I be friends with some members of the opposite sex with whom I went on a single date. And, in one case, someone who I dated for a few weeks. Four people in total over the past two days. So far.

So what?

Besides the fact that Facebook did this over a year ago and I explicitly said I didn’t want to be “friends” with them, let’s think about how Facebook would know I have any link to these people in the first place. By the way, you no longer have the option to tell Facebook when they suggest someone YOU DO NOT IN A MILLION YEARS want to be Facebook friends with.

The culprit has got to be via Gmail, right? Facebook knows my Gmail address. Obviously. That’s how I sign in. Years ago, I let Facebook search my Gmail contacts to find people who I might know on Facebook. But I disabled that a long time ago. And it’s worth noting that I don’t even see how to turn that feature on or off anymore. On top of that, long ago I deleted all messages to and from these people and removed them from my contacts. So as far as Google is concerned, I don’t know these people. I’ve never had any contact with them at all. So, (1) Gmail doesn’t know I know these people, and (2) I’m not even allowing Facebook to use my Gmail history to find “friends” to begin with.

But let’s look at this from the other angle. Maybe these people have left traces of me in their Gmail accounts and Facebook and Google are working their black magic that way. “Hey, Erik, you know this person because they have emails in their account from you. You’re welcome!”

NOT COOL.

But I won’t get bent out of shape because I don’t know if that’s what’s going on at all. But it’s possible, right? I mean, most people don’t clean up their email history, so they probably still have messages to and from yours truly floating around in there. Except for the one who I dated for a few weeks. Pretty sure she hates me and deleted all traces of me from her Gmail. And Facebook or Google don’t give a shit about your privacy. So this could be what’s going on.

The only other source of these links that I can think of is the way I met all of these people in the first place: Match.com.

Oh yeah. Match.com. Love Match.com. That’s how I met my awesome girlfriend. Match.com rules. Please don’t let it be Match.com that has somehow got its fingers deep in my Facebook business. That would probably be the creepiest option. After all, Match.com is all about protecting the identity of its members. I expect Google and Facebook to be creepy like this. You sort of assume companies that make all of their money by selling ads on the internet are going to be a little Big Brother-ish. But Match.com makes money by selling a legitimate service to subscribers. Could they really be selling their members out to Facebook, letting them know which people have been linked to one another? Of course it’s possible.

Look. I don’t know who is to blame for this creepy breach. The point isn’t to know who to point the finger at. The point of my sharing this is to remind you that the internet never forgets. What’s that line from “The Social Network”? “The internet is written in ink”? That may have been the most factually accurate part of the entire film. The internet certainly is written in ink. Indelible, pigment based, archival ink. And the powers that be can find out things about you that you think you deleted years ago. Because neither Google nor Facebook actually deletes anything about you. Be aware of that. Don’t forget it. Hopefully mildly disturbing reminders of that fact are as bad as it’ll get.

I recently moved a decent sized project from Mercurial to Git, using the method Dan Benjamin outlined here. I noticed that the .hg repo was 88.3MB while the .git repo was 141.3MB. That’s quite an inflation. So I ran git gc to try to compress the repo. That didn’t change a thing. However, running git gc --aggressive got the .git repo down to 78.5MB. Nice! Assuming that the repo still works without any problems :) To my knowledge, the care and feeding that Git requires is one of the few drawbacks of Git compared to Mercurial. But I’m plowing forward with Git. I like how it handles branches better than Mercurial and branches are something I want to use more often. Also, everyone is using Git, and this is one area where it doesn’t really pay to be different. Just go with the flow and life will be a little bit easier.

Related: Git Compression