i have a little bit of experience with c, so i started with that, modifying the example macro in the tutorials to line-up with my board (the echo hello-world with led and button from two weeks ago):

since i was using the avrisp2 programmer, i had to remember to add that to the example makefile. otherwise, things went smoothly for the simple program that allows the button to light up the led.

unfortunately, any knowledge of standard c was almost totally inapplicable. (and i also noticed that not many particularly like c for embedded programming!) i realized that the sleep function for example, doesn't get recognized (unless there is another explanation for why that happens?!) and so i used the bit_delay functions from neil's hello.ftdi.44.echo program as a model. i didn't quite understand the _delay_ms() though. my 200 milliseconds in practice turned out to be 2 seconds, which according to the documentation, seems to be due to a "decreased resolution functionality." i don't quite understand why this happens for me though.
also, is this (the following) supposed to happen? and if so, why?

lastly in c, i tweaked things to make a simple program that blinks the led while the button is held down.:

finally, i downloaded arduino and eventually got neil's hello.ftdi program to communicate with my board:

in the next few weeks, i hope to be actually writing code in arduino!