It feels good to be back!

I've been busy for the last two weeks, and so haven't had time to blog at all. I actually experienced mild withdrawal symptoms; after the first few days with no posts, I began to feel an urge to blog again! Unfortunately, assignments and mid-terms for the courses I'm taking - and grading for CS 225 (which I'm TAing) - kept me from writing. The horror that hit me one morning when I realized I hadn't read the previous day's newspapers is still fresh in my mind. :-) (Ok, so I'm a news junkie. Deal with it.) I still have most of an assignment for Computational Complexity left undone and over 150 papers to grade, but they'll just have to wait.

Quick updates for everyone who asked:
1. Mid-terms were ok. Not good, but that's the best I can say about them.
2. The Complexity course (CS 579, for the curious) hasn't become any easier. The only thing that consoles me is that everyone else is finding it incredibly difficult too. A friend commented that it takes a special kind of masochism to register for a course where collectively, the whole class can solve less than half the homework. Still, it's a lot of fun. More than that, it's beautiful.
3. The Socratic method worked with my CS 225 sections. More precisely, I used a modified version, to account for the fact that the students were familiar with some of the material from lectures. Participation in class has increased drastically, and they've even done well on the mid-term! (The fact that the exam was easier than usual has nothing to do with it, I'm sure. - ed.)

UPDATE: My apologies to Dilip Hiro, whom I quoted last night. For some reason, I read 'Iran' as 'Iraq', and so found a perfectly reasonable sentence hilarious.
I didn't even realize my error after reading the sentence several times! I haven't felt this stupid in a long time. Many thanks to Suresh for pointing this out.