-- removed the rest of the traces of the hex, hexbyte and byte classes
that were being called around... now we are going to store a number, and
just parse the string back and forth... FUN! I am thinking of not
converting back from string, but leaving it as an int -- might be easier
to deal with when doing the actually processing...however since I am so
far away from that, and it is such a small change, I will worry about
those details later in life! Speaking of which ... FML. :)