I squirted the syringe of solder paste on the board and tried to line up the chip. As you can see by the image below, I didn't get things lined up quite right.
I wasn't aware that I hadn't gotten the chip lined up before I put it in the oven. In fact, I wasn't aware until I saw the picture. Luckily, the oven sucked the chip right onto the pads. The only thing was that I apparently globbed a little too much paste in a couple of areas.
Though the picture is out of focus, you can see big solder bridges across a set of pins on each side. Solder wick took care of the problem, so I could test. After figuring out that I was misreading the pins on the proto shield and rearranging the wires, I was able to hook up my USBTiny and read the chip type. The chip reported correctly! I was able to upload a simply blinky LED program and blink and LED.
At this point I'm confident that I can do surface mount soldering. However, I consider my first attempt a qualified success because I had to use solder wick to remove excess solder. Now I'm ready to design a new board using surface mount chips!
