I believe I have a working external miner.
Really busy at the day job right now, but will work on it more tonight and through the weekend.
If it is working (left it running when I went to work this morning), I will post some updates tonight. Also will begin working on setting up a pool.
Thats great! There are big bounties for both of these. The bounty for generating a standalone CPU miner (equally fast or faster than the in-wallet miner) is 15,000 CRDS.