Heh, earlier today I checked out the Bitcoin Calculator... it asked me for my mhash and I put in my khash. Man, was I excited... 

Okay, you got me. I was exaggerating and didn't really check my facts, but the computer is making a good bit of noise and using up more electricity than usual, and as of now I have about .0005 Bitcoins, which makes out to about a bit less than a cent.

Oh well. I suppose that even with Bitcoin, it takes money to make money. I just wish that there was a way to boost my speed. I tried all these extra flags on my GPU miner and all they did was slow the hash speed down, so I guess I'll just keep mining for fun until it becomes unprofitable (and it looks like that will happen quite soon).

So wait, maybe I'm not getting this quite right. Is  the amount of Bitcoins you receive from the block directly proportional to your speed?

I just started mining today (and no, I'm not buying any ridiculous GPUs until I know there's actually some hope of producing revenue with them. The reason I started doing this is that I'm short on money. ) and I followed all the instructions to set up GPU/CPU miners. I am currently connected to slush's pool, as my best GPU, an Nvidia Geforce 8500 GT, can only produce 2.5 mhash per second, and from what I can gather from this forum that is a ridiculously awful performance. I am currently mining with that GPU and a second, horribly slow CPU on a different computer.
My question is: is there a mining pool that gives the individuals more Bitcoins than slush? Because, the last I checked, the Bitcoin -> USD rate is somewhat shy of several hundred dollars per Bitcoin, which is around what it would have to be to make this whole foray profitable, with the amounts that slush is giving me. It seems like a bad time to jump on the bandwagon right now - from what I can tell from one day of research the difficulty is skyrocketing.
Thanks,
flight39