jackofallgeeks | Ok, I suck.

So, it's funny what a sandwich and some syntax highlighting can do... It turns out that while I'm not (necessarily) dumb with pointers, I fail at comments -- notes programmers write to themselves that aren't meant to be code, usually delimited by some character combination like /* and */, much like opening and closing tags. Somewhere I forgot to close my comment and it ended up commenting-out (ie, the compiler didn't treat it as code) some pretty important lines. Heh. Serves me write for coding in Notepad. Anyways, after that there were one or two small errors that I fixed up within 30min or so and I was done.

The moral of the story? Don't panic. If you're stuck, take some time away from it to recharge. Try looking at the problem from a different angle. Don't wait until the last minute to get started on this kind of stuff. And get over yourself and ask for help when you're stuck. Even if what you get isn't directly helpful, it may show you the problem in a new light.