Thanks for the warm welcomes!
Dogecoin is kind of a trip. It's just plain silly in its own right, although the community is its strong suit. Very welcoming and pushing towards wide adoption, but at the same time I can imagine pulling in a lot of people who may or may not be in it for the long haul. It has been slumping the last few weeks, but they've just implemented a hard fork to reduce the impact of multipools, so it's still got quite a bit of support. I'm still planning to hodl for the time being. I've never really been into gambling, but I get a little bit of a gambler's rush playing with it. As they say, never hurts to diversify... I really like the analogy of the current state of cryptos to '90s search engines. Back then Google just came out and seemed pretty nifty, but they still had to do a lot to compete with Altavista, Yahoo, Lycos, etc.
As for my mining rig, it's currently quite the "profiteering slumlord" variety, with three random Ebay 5850s on my desktop I work on, and a 5870 in my media center. I just reduce the intensity on the card that runs my displays when I'm working on it, and it's a decent balance outside of the fact that there is really nothing quiet about 3 GPUs running flat out lol. Also that extra heat was nice this winter, but we'll see how I feel in a few months... I'm also CPU mining on my desktop, as it turns out AMD FX processors can still generate a teensy profit mining DOGE, and minerd runs a low enough priority that I can still run Solidworks CAD while mining without losing responsiveness.
I learned the value of getting more coins even at low profit margins when I was Bitcoin mining...what I mined over the summer wasn't even enough to get ROI on my GPU at the time, but then BTC went from $100 to $1000, and my loss turned into a nice little profit.
Just scored a new job where I'll finally be making decent money, once I get settled there I'm planning on throwing together a 5 or 6 GPU rig, thinking of going bananas with some 7950s or an R9 variety.
