Slush you need to update your title to say 55000 ghs 

I think diff 8 is quite good for your hashrate, isn't it?
Yes, the variance in your rewards per block is a bit higher, but Slush had to do something to preserve the pool performance and bandwidth in the current situation of increasing hashing power. I'm afraid not all ASIC users had manually set their diff accordingly...

What has your manually preset difficulty been like?

Yes I am not complaining at all..just posted my observation. To be truthful I was only mining at 10 GHs until just a few days ago , but I still had my diff set at 1 as it still is now but I know that the pool is now adjusting  it automatically. I played around with my workers diff a couple of times but always ended up putting it back to 1. I do understand why the pool is doing it as the pool hashing rate has jumped up so much.  I have another 13 usb miners coming today so once I restart the miners again I am sure I will see the workers diff change until the miners average hash rate settles in. Not sure if this will be my last buying of the USB miners as it seems I can't not mine enough coins to keep up with it all, heck the pool is now  pushing close to 60GHs. 

My BF on Slash seems to be way off... 38 on my end and was 7, then 12 now 16 on pool's end.

I'm afraid I'll have to start ignoring users with colored ads in their signatures. Especially with the ads for dice games...
And I believe I won't miss too much by doing so. :-)
They seem to post more often than they should do, just to multiply the occurence of their ads... For several miserable Satoshis they contaminate and dilute the forum contents.
[edit]Certainly I have paid ads on my mind. I.e. not ads for their own businesses.[/edit]

So we've almost done the whole block eh?

 

this blk killing us.

What? We are talking about the workers diff... Mine just happens to be using 43 USB miners and the pool now has the workers diff set at 9

What happens if I drop out of a long round? Does whatever I have computed so far goes to waste?

honestly the drop out rate is really really bad.  I belive there's an algorithm in place to stop "pool hopping" that really really penalizes you for dropping in the middle and re-joining.  Basically my miners kept going down and you basically get murdered.

But then when you rejoin you tend to remake it close to what your estimates were in a decent amount of time (probably not with this ultra marathon session tho...)

more info here:

https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/1976.msg50002#msg50002