Tried making a ribbon cable from an old IDE ribbon cable because I had a lot of them laying around the house and I'm pretty tight for cash with college and all. Turns out apparently there is a common ground shared across multiple pins. So much for assuming it was a one to one connection from one pin to the end of the cable. Tried wiring it and kept getting button presses on a lot of the leads when testing for resistance checks. Disconnected all the parts and tried again with a single component at a time, and that's when I discovered the shared ground on the IDE cable. Glad I discovered this BEFORE I tried input tests with a powered on Pi. Probably would of accidentally sent voltage across random pins. Looking at a breadboard GPIO adapter and ribbon cables for pi that are straight through on ebay, only about three dollars but I'll have to wait about a month for arrival. In the meantime I can use modified connectors from an old fire-wire adapter from when I built PCs back in the day. If I drill out the dummy plug I can make these work to continue work while I scrounge up three dollars and wait for shipping. Lost about two hours of work time with this IDE fiasco, but it could have been much worse if I had plugged it in for a live test and wrecked my Pi, so there's some positives in this mistake.