William John Bert

Today’s the third annual Friendsgiving, a Thanksgiving-like pre-Thanksgiving event for a bunch of people who like each other; hence, Friendsgiving. Thanksgiving’s always been my favorite holiday so I’m more than happy to celebrate it twice a year. The first two Friendsgivings took place at my house, but because in the spring I traded my room [...]

An interlude from the recent trend of hardcore Django action: When I spoke with a female intern this summer, she recounted how, in 2006, the GNOME Project, a free and open source software project, received almost 200 Google Summer of Code applicants. All of them were male. When GNOME advertised an identical program for women, [...]

Thanks to django-registration, I was able to build a working account registration/login system pretty easily. But I wanted to give users the ability to use their existing accounts through popular services such as Facebook, Twitter, etc., rather than have to create yet another account. Here’s how I did it. Sorting Through the Choices There are [...]

Since March, I’ve been working with DC students from several high schools, including Duke Ellington, Ballou, Wilson and Bell, in evening poetry workshops at 826DC. A bunch of us have been helping out—Mike Scalise, Adam Pelligrini, and Sally Keith (the last two being actual poets, while Mike and I, both prose writers, were faking it [...]

I can’t stand Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, but the best part about waking up at 6:35 a.m. is his Writer’s Almanac. For five minutes he puts his cornmeal voice to good use, first to list this-day-in-literature history tidbits, then to read a poem. In this way I learned that three of my favorite [...]

Julian Barnes has been a favorite author of mine since I borrowed stole Metroland from my friend Mark last winter. Reading Barnes makes me wish I knew some French, since he drops sentences, phrases, and occasionally passages of it, sans translation, into everything he writes, or at least everything of his that I’ve read. But [...]

Google’s new toy, ngrams, graphs the relative frequency of words and phrases occurring in books published over an arbitrary time period from 1500 to 2008. Let’s go. (All search the English Fiction corpus from 1908 to 2008 except the last, which searches American English, 1858-2008.) shot through,stippled,dappled,limpid,limned ashamed,abused,forgotten,determined i love you she cried,i love you [...]

Congrats to my friend Mark Polanzak, who won the 2010 Pint and Pen Contest. The contest rules: Type up (and print out if you must) a story that includes the words PINT, PEN, BUKOWSKI and HARPOON. Entries must be typed, in reverence to the brilliant Charles Bukowski. The word count must be between 500 and [...]