Are we mining the already found block?

Slush's stat page shows that we are mining 254832, however according to BTC Guild, this was already found by them:
19306   254832   2013-08-29 08:23:07 PM   8c7866382409677faee120b9c26bda0221a850fe9bfb3b6317496a927247c8ae   25.01180001

This is consistent with blockchain.info

Is that why we are stuck for more than 8 hours?  "barking up the wrong tree"?!

No.
The page is showing which is the latest block it knows about, not the one we are working on.
At the moment, its showing 254837, which is the latest one, found by deepbit.

Even if we were working based on a too old block, this would not prevent us from eventually finding a share and going on with the next round. That found block would end up being invalid, but we would not be stuck. The current 10 hour round is, depending on how you want to see it, either just bad luck or totally probable within the variance caused by the systems. (Don't get me wrong, its quite unlikely for a round to last 10 hours - as you can see via CDF statistics, its only 0.3 %, but its very likely that at least some of our many rounds last that long.)

Anyone else using the little ASIC's have one that puts out way more hardware errors then the rest?  I have 9 in an Anker USB 3.0 hub and after 24 hours most of them show 40-60 errors but one of them is showing over 800 errors.  I know what one it is, I've removed it and looked it over and I couldn't see any type of damage.  I've tried plugging it in different ports in the hub but its always giving more errors then the rest.

I have a second batch of miners in an Airtech hub and they all show about the same amount of hardware errors, not one of them stands out like that other one.


Maybe I just have a runt in the group?


Oh, and if your looking for other places to get these miners, I've ordered a couple from bitcanary.com right now.  They only cost .37 btc there, I'll let you all know if I have any issues with them.

11:10:14

Sorry if this is a stupid question but why the slowdown lately?

Difficulty...

The process is just waiting for other blocks to be generated, to make sure the block found by the pool is part of the (longest) valid chain and not an orphaned fork.
The pool operator has to decide how much risk to take, some pay right away and hope its valid, some count down without displaying (and have the earnings show as unconfirmed reward, too).