how the hell am I still newbie status. I've been in here WAY over 10 hours. more reading, less posting

not sure on the error have you tried using a different software? guiminer is great for bitcoin or guiminer scrypt alfa for litecoin

Ok, lets hope I get approved soon!

haha relying on BFL makes me smile knowing people including me are waiting 

I know how hard it is to get started using bitcoin, and how frustrating it can be to just buy one!

So here's where you go to get started.

Wallet:

If you're yet to even get a bitcoin wallet, I recommend http://blockchain.info they have iPhone and android apps to help you manage your bitcoins if like me you're not always sitting at your computer.

To buy bitcoins with a credit card and get a wallet service, my new favorite is http://www.coinbase.com

Free bitcoins:

After you've made your bitcoin wallet, try some of these sites for free bitcoins:

Bitvisitor.com - visit sites for 5 minutes for an adverse of 8.8 uBTC
Earnfreebitcoins.com 26 uBTC per 3 minutes? Some please verify
Dailybitcons.org - every hour.
coinreaper.com - one stop for I think 8 sites
Coinurl.com -bitcoins for shrinking urls
[Will add more]

Mining:

Everyone wants to know how to do this because free cash! But what if you don't have a super computer?!?

If you have a basic computer(like most of us) I recommend joining http://mining.bitcoin.cz

There, you will be able to mine bitcoins(generate bitcoins and validate transactions) as a group, and all the profits will be shared based on the amount of work each worker did. My personal choice is RPCMiner(OSX)[ https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/RPC_Miner] but I've also heard of DiabloMiner.

If you don't want to download anything to you computer, but have java, the best place to go is http://bitcoinplus.com. Here you generate something like 0.0000036BTC per .58 hour(based on my computer). You can even have this site running on multiple computer to increase payout!

As more things come out, I will be updating this! Don't be afraid to correct me if something changes or new comes out!

If you liked this, please donate!

Bitcoin: 15oexMQ7E8RS1RAEVen4mUCw3rgiKaEnm3

Thanks for reading! Good luck!

Do you trust Casascius? The coins he made are worth about 9 Million $. Lots of lolly.