Well - I spent tonight putting all the chips in, everything fits!  To be honest I was a bit shocked... I'm still not totally expecting it to work - but I'm more hopeful than before.

The next step is to solder it all in, I'm pretty poor at soldering but fortunately my dad is a stud at it, I'm going to bring him over Saturday to help me out.

Why Saturday?  Well - turns out I didn't have the bypass capacitors I needed, so I just ordered those and they'll be here Saturday.

Which brings me to yet another area I'm not familiar with... what should the value of a bypass capacitor be?  I did some light research tonight and found some various formulas and calculators - but I wasn't clear on the inputs (e.g. what the heck is my 'emitter resistance').  However the consensus seems to be .1uf will be enough.  That was further validated when I found this sheet on http://www.nerdkits.com/forum/thread/1598/:

and hey - if it's on the Internet it must be accurate right?  All joking aside, I'm running at 8mhz so if this is accurate .1uf is indeed fine.  I'll do more thorough research in the morning but the capacitors were cheap enough for me to take a risk and order tonight.  I'll post an update when I figure out the definitive answer for calculating the correct value.

So - without further adieu, here it is with the chips in!  (Technically the chips are in sockets, and the sockets are in the board - this way I won't ruin the chips if the board doesn't work).