Looking at the IP those bloks are generated at, it seems to be in Chicago, where incidentially most of BFLs chips are supposed to be sitting right now "waiting for assembly"

Hmm... I have my doubts as well. Some days ago I initiated a tranfer from a coinbase wallet to another of my wallets, and it was pending for almost 48 hours. It was only .10 btc, but still i found it a bit suspicious. It would just sit there as "pending" with no further info, and you could tell that it was not pending in the "waiting for confirmation" way, but had not even been broadcast to the network. Got no real answer from their support either, but did get my funds transferred when i started posting about the problem on their support forum and emailing them. After 24 hours, that is 

I just read a bit through the dot-bit (namecoin) wiki. It seems that there is no GUI wallet yet, so you will have to use the command line interface, which is not too hard once you get used to it. Basic info here:

http://dot-bit.org/InstallAndConfigureNamecoin

And then, this is mostly just fun while waiting for my BFL miners. If they ever show up....

Only do it for the fun of it, or as others suggested, mine litecoin. I'm currently running a 7770 at about 220 MH/s 24/7, which is only getting me around 0.02 BTC a day. That's less than electricity costs. The card will _never_ pay itself off. But i still think it's fun playing around with, so I do it anyways Had the option of buying five 5970's at about a third of retail price today, great offer, but wouldn't even make sense, since they would never be able to make more than they use in electricity (unless exchange rate skyrockets).

Yeah, that would be rather simple, at least if you base it on an existing project, such as bitcoin. Although, being a P2P network, you at least need a couple of people online and using it before it makes any sense, value or not

About 220 MH/s on a slightly oc'ed 7770 (core at 1150 MHz). Electricity is expensive here, so the coins generated doesn't even cover running costs It's fun anyways though.

Btw, read this:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=17240.0

Much better having your own "bank" than letting someone else  do it

I would definitely NOT want someone else to hold my private keys and/or passwords. That's why they are called private. I think the sense of security one might get from letting someone else handle security of ones wallet/keys/password is ultimately a false sense of security. As soon as you hand out your key to someone, you have lost control of it, and it could have been copied a hundred times. The instant someone might have had access to a private key or password, I consider it compromised. Call me paranoid

That being said, I will be happy to store all of your keys for only .1 BTC a month

(seriously, never hand them out to anyone)

I don't really know about namecoin, haven't looked much into it yet, so can't help you there.

Regarding creating an alternative currency, yes and no. For someone technically proficient it would be pretty easy to fork the bitcoin source, make necessary changes and start a new whatever-coin with a new blockchain. Looking at it that way, creating an alternative currency is easy. But it depends on how you define currency. For most people, I guess a currency will only be a currency when enough people place value in it, to allow trading with a sufficiently large amount of other people. That's the hard part