VB.net and Arduino communication problem

if he would be looking at the asccii table, he would do...wouldn't he?

Yes. It was the odd values in the ASCII table that caused to go hmmm.

i understand that it would be easier to send something you can understand, such as L1 or L0 (from led on and led off) but that's his choice..

Or N and F, A and B, whatever, to make it easy to know what to send. 33 and 34 just do not make sense.