we need a pool

Okay, I'm syncing the blockchain (taking a while)... but will have a pool for everyone soon.

what is the current block height of cloudcoin (and is there a block explorer)?

No block explorer yet, but it is planned. Are you wanting to check you're properly synced? Here's the current network state:

blocks : 464830
difficulty : 2.08437690

block 464830 hash = f521b23deb9c0e4167bf3eae072d5f6b049a0b047e350f1fe37d803f502c654b

(You can verify you have the same block hash by doing 'getblockhash 464830' from the debug console, or RPC commandline)

Excellent. I'll update the OP - do you have a direct link for the CDC pool or should I just link to http://mining.coreco.in/ ?

oh nice
I'll be mines, soon

Yes, you should be.

In a recent 24 hour period (the whole day of 17th August, my time) there were:

- 200 PoW blocks
- 1210 PoS blocks
- 85 payouts by the PoS bonus reward system

If you do the getstakinginfo command (in the debug console on the -qt client, or RPC via commandline) it will give you an idea of how your stake power relates to the rest of the network. In particular, 'expectedtime' will give you an estimate of how long (in seconds) it will take to mint a PoS block. The lower this gets, the more chance you have of minting the next block (before someone else does).

Source says 7 days (60 * 60 * 24 * 7) but in practice it's more like 9.

Is your wallet staking now?