I considered that solution. And in thinking about why I chose to do bit-shifting, I remembered why: I actually needed to combine two _signed_ 32 bit integers in

I considered that solution. And in thinking about why I chose to do bit-shifting, I remembered why: I actually needed to combine two _signed_ 32 bit integers in MySQL, and since I wasn't sure how signed integers are stored in MySQL, I figured that I could just use bit-shifting and move on.