Few things are better than spending time in a creative haze, consumed by ideas, watching your work come to life, going to bed eager to wake up quickly and go try things out. I am not suggesting that excessive hours are needed or even advisable; a sane schedule is a must except for occasional binges. The point is that programming is an intense creative pleasure, a perfect mixture of puzzles, writing, and craftsmanship.

Jonathan Rauch at The Atlantic writes about the Chevrolet Volt, a new electric car from General Motors

With the Chevy Volt, General Motors—battered, struggling for profitability, fed up with being eclipsed by Toyota and the Prius—is out to reinvent the automobile, and itself.

Exploring the Duality between Product and Organizational Architectures: A Test of the Mirroring Hypothesis: a rather dryly-titled (aren't they all, though?) paper taking a look at Conway's Law, and empirically testing it on similar open source and proprietary software development efforts.

And finally, straight from 1898, Claude C. Hopkins's book Scientific Advertising was recently brought to my attention. I'm yet to fully read it, but seems like a very thorough write-up of the foundations of advertising, and being written in 1898, can at times paint quite a picture of life back in that time. [Another PDF version here.]