Intro: I'm not a newb from the computer standpoint (grew up on terminals, I remember BBS, amateur programming...). Bitcoin intrigues me and I believe it's here to stay. It has appeal from the security side and something about it just makes my nerd-sense tingle... anyway enough about that.
So I researched a lot before joining the initiative to 'invest' in Bitcoin and decided I would join Slush's pool. Well I noticed that every time I mine, I end up with shares in blocks that have a HUGE number of total shares... like 1-2 orders of magnitude greater. So what gives? For example, I had my largest shares in this block
http://blockchain.info/block/00000000000000bf8bfe0ceabe3bc4462f7e078fc2a69de7a0ab1ca46b1a1419?site=slush and it was more than 10x larger total shares than any other block in the past two days... and I had my only other shares in the second largest! So was this just bad luck?