I meant no offense... and I very much appreciate the input. I agree,.. knowing how to properly frame a question here is a lot of the trick (though the best way is not always obvious to me). I think I got my answer with the first response. All I wanted to know was if I could re-purpose the data input jack once the sketch is loaded (which happens to be a USB B type port). The answer is,... I cannot "tell" the arduino to do that. So if I still want to re-purpose it for another use, I have to come up with a way to hard wire it. Whether that means de-soldering it and turning it upside down and super-gluing it onto the board (so that I then have access to the pins on the jack),... or somehow destroying the traces on the board so that I can run wires instead... then I was musing that if I just soldered in the wires without destroying the traces... maybe the receiving part of the chip would ignore that there was weird data going on at the port... because assumably it is looking for a sketch to upload (and the data going on there wouldn't be sketch-like).
You're right that I am not all-knowing... but experimenting is a lot of the fun. My sketch already works... If I ruin one $6 board trying to re-purpose the data input jack it's not the end of the world 
PS: I bought your book Grumpy_Mike. Thanks for the work that you do!