I really dont have a strong knowledge of good trading practices but I was thinking of taking about .5 to 1 of my BTC and converting it to LTC. I only have a few BTC but I thought it might be a good idea to diversify a little bit. Looking for advice.

you should not tell people what is fun and what is not. I'm mining at a loss and am enjoying learning the technology.

In Russia, block forks you!!!!

get Apple all pissed and start iCoin

I've been at this about a month now, I knew going in it was going to be hard to profit but still held out hope. At the current BTC rate I'm mining at a loss big time. But it's OK because I'm learning a lot and I am having some fun which is one of the reasons I wanted to start mining. About 10 days ago I earned my first full BTC (milestone one) since then I have earned another full one. Milestone two came after earning that first full coin, the payout that put me over 1 left me with 1.08 or so. I took the extra .08 and bought a $75 game stop card from Gyft, yay first purchase with BTC. I used the card to get a couple of controllers and a copy of Diablo3 for my PS3. Third milestone is that I sold a couple of NMC on btc-e last night for about $11 and it felt pretty damn cool  Also got my gaming rig finally hashing away for LTC. Thanks to cudaminer I'm getting at least 100kh/s from the nvidia card and earned first .1 in just under a week.

Mining at a loss is at least fun. I figure I just as well could have spent the money on TV's and other gadgets but this is providing a very unique kind of entertainment. And who knows what BTC will do. People say it could reach $10,000 this year. I try to remind myself that is just wishful thinking by the Bitcoin community but hey you never know, and now I am part of the Bitcoin community and if it does get to 10k then I'll either be looking pretty lucky or pretty smart. 5 full coins was my goal. I have 2 now and 400Gh/s to get me 3 more before rewards diminish too greatly. After that I'm not sure what I will do. It would be close to summer time I imagine and I would either have to move these down to the basement or just turn them off. It gets 100 degrees here in the summer time and I really don’t want that extra heat. But if they are still earning at least .1 a month at that time I suppose it would be worth trying to move them down to the basement and keep them running.

Linux permanoob here and I suggest Ubuntu. It supported my Butterfly Labs USB devices right out of the box. 

same here , the block in question only rewarded about half of what I usually get.

I just got a new miner last night and was having trouble getting it to stay connected to the pool. I tried both the US and EU URL's but it would mine for 5 to 10 minutes and then stop. I tried several times and was worried I got hosed on this one. I tried connecting it to another pool and it stayed running just fine over night to current. Not sure what could be going on, my other miners have been connected for the last week without issues. Just thought I'd report it, I'm going to try connecting back here tonight when I get home from work.

I cant wait until we are on a roll then  

Well I was thinking we're on a bit of a roll today. Not so much?

I'm in pretty deep. I still maintain that I'm in it for the hobby but I have spent alot on miners on eBay. I just wanted FULL coins to play with so I dropped quite a bit on about 400Ghs of various BFL devices and Avalon devices. Currently I'm around 340Ghs right now with one more 60Ghs on its way via FedEx and THAT'S IT!! Unless I can off my gaming PC I might by another or I have been toying with the idea of using it for some scrypt minig. I've been at it only for a few weeks with my first week also being just experimenting with my gaming GPU. As far as pools, I started with slush but so many glitches with payouts drove me to check out BTC Guild where it seems much more stable. It has been a HUGE learning curve for me though and I have not been able to keep all my miners going due some weird thing that always seems to happen. I have only really been mining with the big machines for 1 week and with all sorts of various issues to work out I've managed about .82 BTC. Hopefully when I get that 60Ghs, I'll get them all up and at 400Ghs and will have my glitches resolved and I can keep them up for a good run. I never expect to get my ROI, I just wanted to have some fun and get some full coins to play with. The way these things sell on eBay I'm tempted to think I can still get half my money back out of these things in about 3 or 4 months when I have gotten hopefully around 5 BTC or so. We'll see how it goes.

being new at this I don't know what could happen in if one pool gets over 50% of the hashing power. What could happen and why?

when I first tried BTC mining just a few weeks ago, I was just using my gaming pc. It has a gforce 660, not the greatest I know but It was getting about 80MHs. Could I use this for these scrypt coins?

Hey all nice to be here after being treated like crap over at slush's pool for the first two weeks of my mining. Things seem alot more organized over here. I may be new but it cant be good when a pool continually has problems paying out confirmed rewards to its members. But dont say anything about it or else you be crying and then they will throw you a guilt trip for coming over here. It seemed like a business struggling to make payroll every week. Maybe he purposly runs it like crap to drive the newbies away and keep the hashrate low, it seems that group beleives there is to much hashing power here but I think that is stupid. Anyway nice to be here. I do have aquestion on the rewards since it is a little different format here. Im just curious, are the rewards on the pplns stats page for open shifts not reflected in your account balance until it shows in the closed shift section? Also for the rewards,  is that i am getting the block reward AND the shift rewards or is that the shift rewards just add up to the block rewards? Sory just being a noob 

does anyone elses worker stats seem low right now?

I'm already regretting moving. I don’t know if I'm doing something wrong but the reward seems low. With about 280G I was getting .01 or better per round, that as about .1 to .15 in a 24 hour period. I understand BTCG has WAY more hashing power so rewards are lower but more frequent? But it only shows about .0002 to .0004 per block so far (there have been 6 blocks found in the last 2 hours) it doesnt seem like that math is going to add up but I'm hanging in there I think to at least see what the 24 hour earnings will be. But I am wanting to come back already..lol just get it fixed plzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!

Hello all, I am still new at this and really new here. I was wondering what advantages there are for joining a team? Should I join a team or will my rewards be just the same either way?

like a business that has a hard time making payroll

I thought I could just chill and wait but I couldnt do it anymore. I moved to BTCGuild. My first two weeks of mining has been pretty rocky and now I just cant accept this lack of communication from pool operators. If we pay fees here then we are customers right? Do we pay fees? I thought we did. That would make us customers and it is totally unprofessional to snub your customers like this by not communicating. I'm going to try btcguild and see how it is over there.

that happens to me because I'm refreshing my browser every minute after a block is found and sometimes I think I refresh right as it is changing from processing... to the reward because I will see none but then a another quick refresh reveals the reward. Now if we can just get the one from a few rounds ago sorted out.