I have made analog electronic circuits before, but never with digital components and never with components this small.

Jonathan gave some useful demos.

I broke a couple of drill bits...

But eventually made the board.

And then the real trouble began:

avrdude: AVR device not responding
avrdude: initialization failed, rc=-1. Double check connections and try again, or use -F to override this check.

I tried replacing the Tiny45 and the voltage regulator...

A few times...

I tried different cable orientations...

I tried recreating my cables...

And rebuilding the PCB board...

I tried connecting the board to an AVR Dragon on a Mac OS X machine, but it couldn't find the USB port...

I tried talking to my electronics...

... and then I tried connecting the parallel cable to the programmer:

Hello World!

Beautiful! I've since learned that when I get this error on my AVR board, it is almost always because the chip isn't getting the correct voltage. Ususally, in fact, it isn't getting any power. So beware, newbies: power your chips before programming them.