hour and a half since last block (aka: time to fork it!)

[deluxeCITY]

could we be looking at a hard fork soon?
next block size wants to be >1Mb?

or am i just impatient.  

The time to 'find' a block and the block size are two very different parts of the bitcoin protocol and do not affect each other. The next bitcoin difficulty will likely go down by ~1.3% in ~1 day. It is expected that luck will sometimes cause it to take a long time between when two blocks are found (the same way that luck can sometimes 'cause' blocks to be found in quick succession).

[raskul]

could we be looking at a hard fork soon?
next block size wants to be >1Mb?

or am i just impatient.  

The time to 'find' a block and the block size are two very different parts of the bitcoin protocol and do not affect each other. The next bitcoin difficulty will likely go down by ~1.3% in ~1 day. It is expected that luck will sometimes cause it to take a long time between when two blocks are found (the same way that luck can sometimes 'cause' blocks to be found in quick succession).

No, i know that. What i was (fearfully) inferring was that the block size might have reached that 1mb limit and as a result may have stalled the chain, which could have caused what we experienced last evening.
Thankfully this was not the case, but as MineForeman correctly pointed out; this will happen eventually at some point next year and the development team are prepared for when it does.

[Chris_Sabian]

Without looking at blocks in 2009 when it was mostly Satoshi mining, the longest times between blocks were:

Block 74637: 2010-08-15 17:02:43
Block 74638: 2010-08-15 23:53:59

Remember, that on average blocks are 10 minutes apart for a given difficulty.  You can calculate the chances of having blocks more than 1 hr or less than 1 min apart with the given difficulty perfectly acceptable.

[raskul]

Without looking at blocks in 2009 when it was mostly Satoshi mining, the longest times between blocks were:

Block 74637: 2010-08-15 17:02:43
Block 74638: 2010-08-15 23:53:59

Remember, that on average blocks are 10 minutes apart for a given difficulty.  You can calculate the chances of having blocks more than 1 hr or less than 1 min apart with the given difficulty perfectly acceptable.

yes, i concur.
i was perhaps just slightly inebriated last night and fell off my chair when a tx didn't confirm, funnily enough though... I had a couple of tx's which did not confirm until after later ones. What might have caused this? I've never seen this happen before. All tx's were sent and received with correct tx fee of 0.0001BTC

see highlighted tx and compare the timestamps of those around it, which confirmed before it:

Transaction ID: 816f6ba6fe588b28b83ca234edca2763683b2335de3aa4ccdf267ecc7cca1407