Grrrrr…well instead of worrying about my supposed untimely death, I focused all my energy on my CS homework problem. I had been stuck on the first problem for a total of 20 hours. Suddenly, I remembered that the putc command in MIPS assembly used the register $a0. That made me very irritated. All I had to add was lw $a0, 0($sp) and I was done. One single line caused me 20 hours of frusturation!!!! But then CS is always better than EE. :p