Internet Radio LCD

[Yogibear]

Hi,
I have built the Raspberry Pi internet radio following Meistervision Kyles tutorial on Youtube however I am only getting 1 row of black squares across my 16x2 LCD display.
1) I am using Raspberry Pi revision 2 with Wheezy and have installed the GPIO and Python development libraries.
2) I substituted GPIO 27 for GPIO21 in the LCD test python script.
3) Before I ran any script the LCD lit up with no characters as expected but as soon as I ran this LCD test script, see attached zip file, the top row filled with squares and now I can't get rid of them. Even after powering the Pi on and off as soon as I connect the radio to the Pi with the ribbon cable the black squares show up.
4) I have checked the wiring and rebuilt the radio 2 times but the black squares are still there. In the attached Zip file there is a file showing how I physically wired up the LCD.
5) The left side of the Next button goes to GPIO18 (Pi 12). The left side of the Prev button goes to GPIO14 (Pi 7). Right side of both goes to 5V with a resistor.
6) The radio part of this works fine when I run Kyles radio.py script except for the Next and Prev buttons which don't work.
7) The LCD display I am using has a reference YJ-162A which from Googling appears to be a standard 16pin display.

I have also attached a photo of the project just in case there is an obvious wiring mistake. Any help or guidance would be much appreciated as I have come to a grinding halt
Thanks Simon

[Yogibear]

would this question be better asked in a different forum as not many replies so far?

[DexOS]

I do not know anything about this project, but just looking at your image it looks like your are connecting one row of gpio with the other row
Thats very bad, if it true.
As all the holes in the same rows on a breadboard are connected to one another.
I could be wrong, as i do not know how the pins are under the black socket.
But it looks bad too me.

ARE YOU SURE THE BLACK SOCKET GO THERE ? and not each side of the gap ?

[Yogibear]

You're absolutely right, how stupid. Thanks a lot for pointing this out. Cheers