I would like to point my miners at a dedicated pool for the next POW stage but I may be at work when we hit block 50,000.
I don't want to miss the start so is it OK to point my miners at a pool a few hours before the POW stage starts?
A much easier solution would be to have your favorite Silkcoin pool first in your config file and another scrypt coin pool second and use that configuration right now.
Mining software such as sgminer/cgminer will check the first pool and if it doesn't work, will automatically go to the second pool.
Meaning, that from now until Silkcoin pool will be up again, sgminer/cgminer will use the second pool and as it checks every 1 to 5 minutes if the first pool is alive or not, will automatically switch to the Silkcoin pool whenever it is up.