This superb book is a collection of fifteen interviews with well-known and highly-regarded programmers (Norvig, Armstrong, Knuth, etc). Siebel (author of Practical Common Lisp) is a professional programmer with a keen sense of the (brief) history of the profession. This gives the interviews a depth and a richness that even a clever journalist could never have matched. Siebel is a consistently thoughtful interviewer who asks just the right mix of questions. In any one interview, the questions range from practical ones concerned with how the subjects debug code to more general questions about whether the nature of programming has changed over time. Across interviews, Siebel asks enough of the same questions that we can start to view the answers in comparative perspective, while also allowing what is special about the careers and interests of the subjects to emerge.

In short, if you’re interested in programming, this book is wildly engrossing. A word of warning: If you don’t have any experience programming, and some background knowledge of the field, you’re probably not going to be able to get much out of the book. Some passages were certainly over my head, as I’ve only been a professional programmer since June, when I got my green card, and if I recall correctly, only really got started teaching myself Python about a year and a half ago. But most of it was accessible and inspiring to this junior programmer.

Amy Sohn. Prospect Park West

We lived briefly in (very South) Park Slope when we first moved to Brooklyn, and although we’ve since moved out to Flatbush, we’re back in the Slope all the time. We eat at Al Di La whenever we can afford to. We’ve been members of the infamous Park Slope Food Coop for several years now, and we’re set to have a baby in the Spring. So although my expectations weren’t all that high, I pretty much had to check Prospect Park West out of the Brooklyn Public library, after waiting patiently for my turn in a queue that was over 250 holds long. Prospect Park West is set against this familiar background. The plot follows the ill-considered affair of a Park Slope mother, whose life is connected to a few other characters by a string of coincidences that I would have found far-fetched ten years ago, before I started to notice equally striking coincidences in my own life. (Always remember that odds are that life will be filled with the improbable, since there are an enormous number of possible improbable events—so many that it would be highly improbable for us to go long without another improbable event occurring. This is one reason, among several, that life is filled with strangeness and magic, if you keep an eye out for it.)

Prospect Park West is not a great work of literature, but it’s readable enough. The book’s basic outlook is misanthropic without much in the way of compensating insight. I get that some Park Slope mothers can be a bit much, but so can the author when she (in the mouths of her characters) gets going about them. The author gets points, though, for her depiction of the strange, confusing, prickly racial tension you run across in Brooklyn all the time, and which I struggle to explain to my friends back in Canada. This too was perhaps also a bit overdone, but unfortunately not by much.

One correction: A check out line at the Coop that stretches back to the bread section does not count as long. I don’t know when Sohn shops, but that’s pretty routine in my experience. Long is when it goes all the way along the produce aisle as far back as the milk section.

Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist

This is only the second Dickens novel I’ve read, the other being A Tale of Two Cities. I found A Tale of Two Cities pretty silly, but against my better judgment found the ending weirdly sublime. I didn’t have as much luck with Oliver Twist, which I read for the sole reason that we’re naming our kid “Oliver” and I figured I should at least read the book that helped make his name famous. (On my to do list: Who the hell is Oliver Cromwell?) I found the social commentary in the first part of the book entertaining enough, if heavy-handed. But as the plot advanced, the melodrama and the general absurdity of it all started to suck the fun out of it. Also, I know the book is a product of the early nineteenth century, but the fact that one of the characters is usually referred to simply as “the Jew” and even gets to be the butt of a big nose joke was driving me nuts. What’s that? Dickens was a child of his era, so cut him some slack? Well, I’m a child of my era, so take your own advice and cut me some slack while you’re at it.

Vivant Denon. Introduction by Peter BrooksNo Tomorrow

Vivant Denon was, among other things, the first director of the Louvre Museum, in charge of sorting and cataloging all the goodies that Napoleon stole from the Egyptians. A wing of the Louvre bears his name to this day. Denon was also “maybe, probably,” in the words of Peter Brooks, the author of No Tomorrow a thirty odd page long erotic masterpiece. The New York Review of Books has recently published a fine bilingual edition of the story with an introduction by Peter Brooks. The intellectual imprimatur provided by the publisher and the scholarly introduction makes it totally not skeevy that I’m writing about erotica on my blog.

There’s a lot to admire in Denon’s story and the way he tells it. As for the tale, a woman seduces a man, for pleasure, without negative consequence for either. As for the telling, Denon is delicate without ever being prudish, erotic without ever being explicit. It’s good clean fun for the adults in the family.

Surendra Verma. The Little Book of Maths, Theorems, Theories, and Things

This book covers a very wide variety of mathematical and logical puzzles and problems and more. The author even throws in a discussion of the Body-Mass Index*, presumably because it’s . . . expressed in numbers? Because it’s a little book, and because it’s trying to get to so many subjects, and because the author also likes to throw in limericks and factoids and anecdotes willy-nilly, this book treats each of its subjects in an extremely superficial way. I like limericks and factoids and anecdotes as much as the next guy, but there really wasn’t room for a lot of math in this book, or much opportunity for the author to make the case that mathematics is intrinsically interesting.

Let me also take a moment to plead with the publisher to fix the typos in this book before reprinting, if the book ever gets another shot at life. You know you’re in bad hands when you read the sentence: “No one has ever found an even number that can be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers” (p. 76). Oh, really? Cause I think I might be about to make mathematical history!

* Verma tells us that knowing your BMI “can give you an idea of how healthy your weight is.” He doesn’t note that a lot of researchers think the BMI is misleading or useless.

The meeting was well attended, and ran from about 8pm to 9:45pm. About 25 tenants crowded into the lobby of the building, which was noticeably cleaner than I had found it on Wednesday. They were joined by Latrice Walker, a representative from the office of Congresswoman Yvette Clarke’s, and for part of the meeting by New York City Council Member, Mathieu Eugene. Michael Grinthal and tenant organizer Aga Trojniak from the Flatbush Development Corporation were also present.

Considering the level of anger and frustration among tenants, the meeting went surprisingly smoothly, for the most part. Much of the credit for this has to go to Samantha Paige, a tenant in 2017 Caton who led the meeting in an efficient and productive way, and to Alcobi, who struck a conciliatory tone on behalf of the landlords. Paige went through a list of demands that the tenants had presented to Alcobi in his office on Wednesday. These included, among other things, a qualified superintendent for the building (which has not had a super for at least six months), that work be done by qualified, licensed tradesmen, and that problems be dealt with in an efficient, responsive, and timely way. Paige volunteered, with another tenant, to coordinate efforts to ensure that tradesmen would have access to individual apartments. Paige made it clear that the access issue was a practical matter that tenants could deal with effectively later, and kept the meeting focused on the list of demands. As a conciliatory gesture, she also stressed that tenants would need to do their part to assist in keeping the building clean and safe, and emphasized some sympathy with the landlord’s perspective a businessman.

After Paige finished, Alcobi spoke. In a rather quiet and understated way, Alcobi is clearly a gifted public speaker, and he handled the situation about as deftly as I can imagine anyone doing it. After thanking Paige for acknowledging his own perspective, he moved on to his main concerns. These included trash in the hallways, and what he described as illegal washing machines in apartments that he blamed for some of the leaks. At this point, Latrice Walker pointed out that whether the washing machines were illegal or not depended on whether they were permitted by individual leases. No one at the meeting, including Alcobi, actually knew off the top of their respective heads what the leases said, and Alcobi was forced to moderate this point.

There followed a lengthy back and forth as the tenants attempted to tie each of the demands to a date by which Alcobi would commit to fulfill the demand. Some of the deadlines were easier to fix than others. The issue of a qualified super was especially thorny, with Alcobi protesting that it was difficult to find a qualified super in short order, and tenants pointing out that they had already been waiting six months. The tenants insisted that Alcobi find a super by the next meeting with him, which was scheduled for March 18th, but Alcobi wouldn’t commit to the date, though he said he would try to find someone.

After the meeting broke up, I spoke with Alcobi briefly. I recreate the conversation from memory, because Alcobi told me that he wasn’t comfortable being taped. I asked him if he was pleased about the meeting. He said he was, but made clear that he didn’t appreciate having a different, and unrelated, business picketed the other day. (Alcobi is a part owner of the building, and a part owner and founder of Peter Ashe Real Estate.) I said that I could understand that, but that I had spoken to a number of tenants and heard a lot of horror stories. “This is a building with a lot of problems,” he told me. “A lot of problems.”

I asked Alcobi if he was pleased with the management company he had hired to handle the building’s affairs. Even with someone from the management company standing beside us, Alcobi wasn’t willing to go this far.

“I’m putting a lot of pressure on them to do things right,” he said. “Let me just say that.”

“So would you say that they’re on probation now?”

“No. Close watch. Not probation.”

He told me that firing the management company would hardly solve anything, since this would just lead to significant delays as an entirely new team worked to get up to speed. Alcobi stressed to me that he was only now learning about the seriousness of the problems in the building.

Given the general incompetence of his management company and what tenants had told me about their style of communication, I can readily believe that Alcobi hasn’t been receiving candid and regularly updated accounts of the state of his property. Still, I wasn’t convinced by the “shocked, absolutely shocked” pose Alcobi struck in both the meeting and in conversation with me. Alcobi has been contacted directly by tenants and tenant organizers repeatedly over the last few months. He arranged a meeting several months ago between tenants and management in which the management committed to fulfill a number of tenant requests that were subsequently ignored. Even if Alcobi had not conducted any active follow up on the progress of the repairs following that meeting, the steady stream of complaints to his office should have tipped him off that something was amiss. It isn’t as if the tenants suddenly jumped up one day and started to picket the man’s office in a fit of pique. They’ve been working fruitlessly for months to get basic repairs done on their apartments.

In any case, how much Alcobi knew on Wednesday morning about the condition of his property is sort of a moot point now. It is certain that he knows now, and that he’s given a commitment to fix the problems. I’ll revisit this issue in a future post to let you know how all this turns out.

Much more below the fold (including bonus celebrity photos!).

I live in Flatbush, but not at 2017 Caton Ave. Still, I should say right at the outset that I’m hardly an impartial spectator on all this. A good friend of mine, Aga Trojniak, from the Flatbush Development Corporation (FDC), a local non-profit, is taking a leading role in tenant organizing in the building (along with Michael Grinthal, at South Brooklyn Legal Services). And I’m in the middle of writing software (on a volunteer basis) to help the FDC handle client management. Nevertheless, I’ve made a good faith effort to track down the facts as accurately as I could. Although I was able to speak with someone from the management company handling the property, Asher Alcobi wasn’t available when I called this morning for comment (he wasn’t available for the Daily News yesterday for comment either). I’ll update this post in the future if any corrections are in order.

It doesn’t take a lot of prompting to get residents of 2017 Caton Ave to describe the problems with the building. I spoke with a few of them when I arrived at the building before everyone departed for the protest. Samantha Paige, who works for a health insurance company, has lived in apartment 8 for about four years. She cited a “multitude of problems” ranging from long interruptions in gas, heat, and hot water, to surprisingly large holes in her son’s bedroom floor. “Meet Richard,” she said tersely as she led me into her son’s bedroom to show me the holes, “He’s my downstairs neighbor.” I peered down into Richard’s apartment and thought, “Hello Richard.” Unfortunately, this picture really doesn’t give a sense of how much you can see through the floor.

Paige led me next into the bathroom and showed me the ceiling, which appeared to be coming down in the area over the toilet. “Every damn night it rains on my head in this room.” The management actually re-did the bathroom fairly recently, but they neglected to address the leaking water from the apartment above, and the ceiling started to fall apart and mold over in fairly short order.

Paige’s apartment is in poor condition, but not all the problems with it are visible. Paige’s four year old son Kalvin was recently discovered to have elevated levels of lead in his blood, a problem that can lead to all kinds of developmental and learning disorders. Paige told me that she never received standard lead warnings that landlords are required by law to send to tenants, and that the lead in her apartment was only cleaned up when she called 311 to have the city address the problem.*

Virtually every tenant I spoke with echoed Paige’s complaints about leaks, along with her more general complaints about the building. Last month, a fire broke out on the first floor, the result of faulty electrical wiring and a gas leak. The gas was off for between eight and twenty days, depending on the apartment (though most seem to have been off for eight days). When I arrived in the building, the radiator in the lobby was driving huge quantities of steam into the air in a way I’ve never seen before, perhaps because it’s virtually assured to cause serious problems with mold.

Scott Kellum, a student at Parsons studying graphic design, has lived in the building for two years. Repeating a complaint I heard from a number of tenants, Kellum told me that the management’s only response to leaking water and sewage in his apartment was to paint over affected areas. Sometimes the heat goes off. Sometimes it goes on, but the pipes bang so loudly that it’s impossible to sleep (at one point he and his roommates were forced to sleep elsewhere for a month). Kellum tells me he’s called the management company repeatedly, but that they usually stick him on hold indefinitely. Sometimes, before they stick him on hold they tell him that he’s the only one complaining.

As it turns out, Kellum is most certainly not the only one complaining. Lacy Warner, who works in retail, has lived with her roommates in a three bedroom apartment in the building for one year now. They’ve suffered three infestations of bed bugs in the last five months, made all the more difficult to contain by all the holes in the floor and ceiling. Management has arranged largely ineffective spot extermination in their apartment on some occasions, but on others has responded skeptically to complaints about bed bugs, asking Warner at one point to actually catch a bed bug to confirm infestation. (This is difficult.)

And so it goes, in one conversation after another with tenants in the building. So what’s going on here? Richard E. Williams, who has lived in the building since 1979, tells me that the building used to be well maintained, but was increasingly neglected as the years wore on. The current owners of 2017 Caton Ave. purchased the building about two years ago, and a number of tenants tell me that the building’s maintenance suffered a sharp decline after the change in ownership. The management has allowed the building to go without a superintendent for at least half a year now, which tenants say leaves them without anyone in the building to arrange large repairs and carry out minor ones. Tenants also complain that the work that actually does get done on the building is carried out by unlicensed and incompetent contractors.

I spoke with Avi Fried at the management company about some of these issues, after he had briefly, and mostly unsuccessfully, attempted to introduce tenants to a new hire he said would help coordinate repairs. (At this point the tenants were gearing up to leave to protest outside the office of Peter Ashe Real Estate, and professed themselves uninterested in further communication with the management after months of fruitless discussion.) I confess that I couldn’t make any sense of Fried’s explanation for the fact that the management company had no immediate plans to hire a super for the building. His explanation, as far as I could follow it, was that the repairs needed in the building were too much for a super. I pointed out that this is no reason to avoid actually hiring a super, who is expected to deal with all kinds of smaller repair issues in the ordinary run of things, but he kept repeating his original point. To be fair to Fried, my line of questioning was a bit more muddled than the last sentence makes it sound. But to be bluntly honest, I’m not convinced a clearer line of questioning would have produced a more logical response.

When I asked him, Fried said he was happy with the work that the contractors had done in the building over the last three or four months. One issue Fried complained about was the difficulty he said he had experienced in arranging times when he could get into the apartments to work on them. When I spoke with Aga Trojniak, my tenant-organizer friend, she told me that several months ago the tenants had sent the management company a detailed schedule setting out clearly when tenants would be available for repairs on their apartments.

Anyway, in spite of a last minute appeal by the management that was angrily shouted down in the lobby of the building, a group of about 20 protesters left the building and headed up to the Upper East Side. (In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I accepted subway fare from my friend Aga for both trips. Forgive me this lapse of pseudo-journalistic independence: I’m as poor as a church mouse.). Once there, they stood outside Peter Ashe Real Estate and shouted slogans while a smaller group went inside to negotiate with one of the two owners.

Here they are protesting:

This adorable child has elevated levels of lead in his blood:

I stood off to the side, watching the protesters chanting and passing out leaflets to bewildered Upper East Siders. The protesters were lucky in enough to be joined by a reporter, and a little later, a photographer, both from the Daily News. (Much to the delight of the tenants, managers from the management company had fled from reporters from the Daily News earlier in the week when they showed up at the building.)

Here’s the reporter, Erin Durkin, asking Lacy Warner a question:

Here’s the photographer doing his thing:

Too bad for you that he didn’t take the pictures in this post.

Here’s the photographer checking his shot of the child with the “Lead, lead hurts my head” sign. These people are professionals. They know news when they see it.

The protesters had a number of chants, many led by Warner, who seemed to have a knack for coming up with them. “No hot water, no heat,” they shouted. Then, “Lead, lead, hurts my head,” and “Peter Ashe, Peter Ashe, we’re not trash.”

Every once in a while the protesters fell back on the highly topical, “We’re slumdogs. They’re millionaires.” About the fifth time they chanted this, an improbably gorgeous woman glided out of the camera store next door to the realty office and started to film the protesters with her cell phone. It was an unusual level of interest from someone uninvolved in the protest, I thought. Her companion cleared up the mystery for me by pointing out that she had recently starred in the movie “Slumdog Millionaire.”

And whaddayaknow, he was right! It was Frieda Pinto. At this point your faithful correspondent’s camera betrayed him (by which I mean that I must have messed up the settings on the camera without noticing when I was moving it in and out of my pocket). So the photos here are even worse than the ones above. Still, it is undeniably Frieda Pinto, who stood very patiently for two shots while I fumbled and apologized and muttered about my camera.

Eventually, the negotiators emerged from the Realty Office. The owners of the building agreed to meet with the tenants this evening at 8pm. When they do, they’ll likely be meeting a group of tenants energized by the nice three quarter page spread on their protest in this morning’s Daily News (not online, unfortunately [Update: Now it is.).

I'll post later about what comes of all this, if anything.

* The Daily News piece that came out this morning says that the lead still hasn't been cleaned up.

[Edits:
-Later on 02-26-2009: Clarified relationship between Peter Ashe Real Estate and the property in both the title of the post and the first paragraph.
]

Fun stuff, if you live in my neighbourhood. If not, perhaps not your cup of tea. Anyway, this caught my eye:

The importance of easy access to rapid transit was not lost on T.B. Ackerson, the builder of Beverly Square East and West, who, during the construction process, used his political clout to get both the Beverly Road and Cortelyou stations built. Those two local stops are one block apart, the closest subway stops in the system.

And it’s true! They’re very close together—about the length of a damn subway!—as the not-very-good picture below suggests. It’s taken at Cortelyou station, looking down the tracks to Beverly station. I just knew that money and political clout had to explain the closeness of the stations.

My wife and I are mulling over a possible move to Redhook, if we can find a place that isn’t too far from the subway. This charming picture certainly adds to the allure of the neighbourhood. Now peek below the fold.

I suppose if I were Thomas Friedman I would use this as a starting point for praise of outsourcing and/or a little not-very-tough criticism of Bush’s foreign policy – stopping along the way, of course, to relate some charming anecdote told to me by some prince or other. But I think I’ll just note the observation and head out for a show.

UPDATE: See the comments section for one reason to think I’ve just got a bad ear.