I finally picked up a character LCD display that I was hoping to use for some of my projects. Yesterday, I interfaced it with a pic16f628, using the 4-bit interface. It would still be good to investigate using the shift register approach instead, because currently I am using 6 bits. Circuit diagram is provided. I hard wired the contrast is set by choosing R2=1.2k and R1=10k which gives .1V (you need something close to groundn). You can also use a potentiometer I suppose. There is a lot of stuff on using these displays on the web. Here are a few links...