those damn mini usb jacks are so flimsy. One wrong move and the thing popped off like a bottle cap. I am a newcomer to the microcontroller/electronics scene, and though I knew better, I attempted to resolder the jack back on with a $3 soldering iron and thick solder. When that failed miserably, I tried to solder wires from the PCB traces to the mini USB jack... this proved to be more difficult than I had anticipated. Through sheer luck I managed to get all of them except for one, but time after time I was unsuccessful at tapping into the last trace, and now it's hiding beneath the FTDI chip and soldering a wire to it is no longer a possibility.
Being stuck with the feeling that there is another way to program my arduino, I read about possibly circumventing the whole FTDI chip altogether, and received some very general advice on another forum that eluded to the same solution and mentioned something about going to the serial header and wiring an auto reset circuit. Seeing as how I'm a total N00B at all of this, I think I need more explicit instructions. If it's worth my while to just get a new FTDI or a new arduino altogether, I'll just do that.(I'm so impatient though and don't want to wait for the mail to deliver it to me!) I already bought a FEZ Domino, and while it seems powerful, it's a little cumbersome for the simple flashing laser-spinning mirror-trippy lighting-thingamajigger I'm playing with.
Soooooo.... if any of you geniuses out there have any links to tutorials or ideas on how I can get my arduino talking again, I'd be oh so grateful!!!! 
thx in advance!
Not sure if you have got an answer on this or not, but if you refer to the schematic for the FT232 USB interface, you'd see that the 4 pins are connected to the fuse (usb pin1) FT232 pin 16 (usb pin2), FT232 pin 15 (usb pin3) and usb pin 4 connects to the ground.
Thanks man, that was exactly what I needed!