There's something very strange going on with the
http://dime.mine-pool.net/ pool. I connected up and got 3x 50K payouts in about the first two minutes. Then got a 145 payout a few seconds later, then nothing since then - for hours. The other people in the pool seem to be getting payouts just fine. Big ones. Just nothing to any of my addresses. VERY strange.
This is not so strange once you realize the formula for the block reward:
Block Number % 1024 * base Coins
What it means is the block reward starts at 1024, and ends at 1048576 every 1024 blocks. So the block reward changes while you mine. If you keep mining eventually you will reach the higher reward blocks and suddenly you will get very nice rewards.
The formula is in the first post, but I think most people do not notice it initially.
Also note that the difficulty has gone up quite a lot. Mining with anything below 1-2Mhash is going to be very random when you will hit a block reward.