Hillary - 2007-08-02

I'm working on a login, .php page.  I used the following query in my login.php :

$query = "SELECT user_id, first_name FROM users WHERE username='$u' AND pasword=PASSWORD('$p')";
$result = @mysql_query ($query);
$row = mysql_fetch_array ($result, MYSQL_NUM);

if ($row) {
        $_SESSION['first_name'] = $row[1];
        $_SESSION['user_id'] = $row[0];

        ob_end_clean();

//// End of code in question.

Even when i enter the above SELECT query directly into PHPAdmin i still get back empty results.  Even when i define the correct values directly and they definitely match what is in the mysql database setup.--STILL empty results.

PLEASE HELP!  What am i doing wrong?

thanks!