So I eventually gave up on installing Debian on a real partition and began installing it in a VirtualBox. My eventual plan is to move the VirtualBox partitions to real partitions, but we'll see.
Anyway, installation is proceeding smoothly except for the fact that I'm waiting for 1402 packages to download on a network with 600 ms ping times (which IIRC is super slow - even if I'm wrong and the ping times are OK, everything else is slow, sooo...). This problem is exacerbated by the fact that I chose the "desktop environment" task in the installer.
So, I have been searching for things to do in the past couple hours. One, I have fixed ALL OF THE DNS PROBLEMS! I've no idea how, but somehow, I made it work.
Also, I started (and then stopped, to not hog bandwidth) downloading the Armory Bitcoin client. Because I (as of about a month ago) do Bitcoin. Yay! I'm also going to do mining on my MacBook soon (I'll join a pool).
Other than that I've just been messing around, mostly with my irssi proxy to add the server that #debian is on.