two orphan blocks in a row ? ouch ..
Other posts here indicates it could be related to networking problems, Some thinks forwarding inbound port to the machine running your client may help, dunno that much to tell though..
So does that mean that either I'm mining with a bad configuration or that I need to join a pool to prevent getting an orphaned block?
Or is it something else?
How many nodes - other wallet clients - are you connected to? On my side, it's usualy 25 - 30 connections. For solo mining,
you should be connected to as many as possible so that information about block you solved propagate fast to many nodes.