CowJam:
Never heard of the phidget but I come from a similar background. The nearest I'd come to fiddling around with electronics before I started with the arduino was soldering a small LCD display to plug in to the parallel port of my PC (and that was really tricky for me at the time).
haha, that was almost there I started too 
I started with 8 leds and resistors soldered on, and then had a program to turn them on and off. Later I then wanted to put an LCD display on instead, and sheees, the wires must be in the right order... what is up and what is down? where is pin 1? AAARGH it needs a pot too!!!! 