Many thanks to Chris Bryant (CCIE #12933) for finally making the decimal to hex conversion easier to understand. Put simply, it's base-16, DUH... It seems obvious, but for some reason this simple fact just didn't sink in until 6:30 this morning.
For example, the hexidecimal number 4A simply means 4 units of 16 plus 10 units of 1, or ((4 * 16)+(10 *1)) which equals 64 + 10 which equals 74.