Yep, I typed it quickly and the last paren should be removed. Sorry about that. I corrected the post above. Keep the '$'.
I was holding up dinner, and I was suppose to be grilling the steaks.
Are you testing on a live hosted board or a local test board? If you are on a local test board add conditionally some diagnostic functions to the safe_functions array. Even "var_dump" can be useful to see if you passed the correct data and type.