I've been playing around with FPGA development and am a backer of the Parallella kickstarter project. It was through these sources that I first began to notice and pay attention to the 'chatter' about mining and it just didn't seem to slow down. Over the recent holiday break - I decided to take over a mostly idle Intel desktop i7 and play with cpuminer... I was blown away at the hashing rate (around 24Mh/s on BTC) compared to the performance of the ASIC modules compared to the Hashing rates of the top miners in some of the pools I looked at...
I tip my hat to those who are willing to risk their money in the hopes that today's best performance will last long enough to pay for itself much less turn a profit. I'm not sure I'm enough of a risk taker
Anyhow - first post - thanks to those who host the forum - it's a great source for knowledge