The Maytag man and memory deallocation

So the other day I was at home minding my own business when my wife asked me one those homeowner kinds of questions where your initial reaction involves profanity.

Wife: “Where is all this water coming from?”

Me: “Dammit”

Turns out it isn’t the biggest deal in the world, the washing machine’s drainpipe is draining too slowly for the pressure coming out of the washing machine pump. Thus, once the pipe is saturated the water has nowhere to go but backwards and all over the floor. What’s probably going on is that there is some kind of partial blockage somewhere that my snake can’t reach. And it is because of this that some lucky plumber is going to make some money.

Admittedly this doesn’t have anything to do with technology, although I could spin some crazy analogy of internet bandwidth being like a drainage pipe and when the internet gets clogged by a giant lint ball that soapy water spills all over your wireless network. But, let’s be honest, that would be lame.

What I was doing at the time when I got this lovely news was reading up some Objective-C stuff and thinking about how in Leopard/Xcode 3.0 Apple is adding garbage collection to Obj-C. But what is really weird is that this moment of laundry mishap was the beginning of several GC sightings over the last few days.

The last couple of weeks I’ve been working on an internal web application that is written in ASP.NET with C# and its GC-ness. Also a number of blogs I normally read have brought it up lately. And then, just now, after having a conversation which lead to a link, to another link, to another, I ended up at JWZ’s old rant about GC.

One could probably spin this into being some sort of sign, although everyone knows that true signs only come in the form of thunderclaps. Well, and the occasional toasted cheese sandwich.

For me, I’ll just have a plumber come out and collect the garbage from my pipe… wait, collect the garbage, another sign. Oh dare to dream that the lint ball will look like something. I can see my eBay riches now.