Hello,
I've been mining on P2Pool for about 4 days now. Running my own node with about 120 GH/s. The recent 52 hour stretch of bad luck was a bit tough, but I think I'll stick with it a while.
I had a few questions for those that have been at this a while.
For (1), you can use the share explorer, which is part of the web interface, accessible with a browser on port 9332.
For (2), you could look at your shares in the share explorer and follow the links to see if any became blocks...