With regards to the pool, I ran into problems at first but its because there is a mistake on the getting started page, It lists the port as 9088 when in fact in the first post of this thread it lists it as 9988 - I tried both and failed on 9088 but connected on 9988.
make sure you have the correct one matey the winning port number is
9988
:-) hope it helps
I'm behind a proxy at the moment, so I can't double-check if this works or not. However, I was using the port on the Getting Started page. I'm sure that was the issue.