I'm just curious. Can you watch a Miner actually work on the block chain or are there too many numbers to be seen at any given time?
There is no sense of progress in mining. Essentially, mining consists of filling up a potential block with random extra data until it looks a certain way. There is no way to determine in advance what data you need to use as filling to get the desired look, all you can do is try some data and see if it works. Each 'hash' is an attempt at picking one form of this extra data and seeing how it looks.This makes mining simply a lottery. Every next attempt has the same chance of winning as the previous and the only thing you can do to increase your odds is increase the number of attempts you can make per second (= the hashrate).
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I'm also curious if you can point your miner in a certain direction or aim it?
No. Other than optimizing the speed at which the miner can makes its attempts, there is no way to prime or optimize the process.
I've written a fairly elaborate, but not too technical summary of the how and why of the mining process on my blog. If you're interested, you can check it out. The relevant posts are:
http://bitcoin.rannasha.net/?p=8 (On why we need mining and the blockchain)
http://bitcoin.rannasha.net/?p=23 (On what hashing actually is and how the mining process works)
http://bitcoin.rannasha.net/?p=29 (On pool-mining)
Too tired/lazy right now so I bookmarked for later.
