Topic: hello and multiple newb questions (Read 435 times)

hello, i'm rusty, first post here.
I'm Belgian and have been mining for about 2-3 month's now.
i have a 5870 that i just got up and running with cgminer in a dedicated "rig" and i have a 7970 running in my work/private desktop.
5870 @ 420 Mhs and 7970 @ 660 Mhs... running at cgminer.
i just love to tweak the hell out of the card to get the max out of these cards. (but the 7970 has been set pretty much stock because of instablilty issues)

i have always been a nvidia man, but since i discovered bitcoins, that has changed.
I'm currently getting a small profit out of bitcoins by purchasing stuff you can find on different site's like bitmit and then reselling them.
it's not much, but it get's me a little pocket change.

For the rest, i have a part time job at a computer store that is also interested in bitcoins. (they just invested 500 euro's in bitcoins for unknown purpaces)

my questions

i see a lot of people posting about having shares in a company like ASICMINER.

so my question.

how and where do you get these shares. i would like to invest some of my money, as long as it is more profitable then GPU mining.

and:

what is the best pool for mining?
i currently use 50btc.com because it was the first one that poped up on google.
and i like the graphs that it has.

but a lot of downtime really takes the fun out of it.