Is this thing on? (How to tell if my cpuminer is working?) I have pretty much no idea what I'm doing. But I've had cpuminer running on my laptop for a half hour or so, just playing around. I know it's not near worth the time or electricity, I'm just having some fun.

I'm using Slush's pool, and ran the program:

./minerd --url http://api.bitcoin.cz:8332 --user &lt;me&gt; --pass &lt;pass&gt; --threads 8


And I seem to be generating normal output:

[2013-11-27 13:28:05] thread 7: 291732 hashes, 5.18 khash/s
[2013-11-27 13:28:05] accepted: 0/151 (0.00%), 41.48 khash/s (booooo)
[2013-11-27 13:28:08] Stratum detected new block
[2013-11-27 13:28:08] thread 3: 183216 hashes, 5.18 khash/s
[2013-11-27 13:28:08] thread 7: 17988 hashes, 5.28 khash/s
[2013-11-27 13:28:08] thread 1: 38664 hashes, 5.26 khash/s
[2013-11-27 13:28:08] thread 6: 151224 hashes, 5.16 khash/s
[2013-11-27 13:28:08] thread 4: 161664 hashes, 5.18 khash/s
[2013-11-27 13:28:08] thread 2: 79848 hashes, 5.16 khash/s
[2013-11-27 13:28:08] thread 5: 60576 hashes, 5.21 khash/s
[2013-11-27 13:28:08] thread 0: 164808 hashes, 5.17 khash/s
[2013-11-27 13:28:09] thread 3: 5484 hashes, 5.33 khash/s
[2013-11-27 13:28:10] accepted: 0/152 (0.00%), 41.74 khash/s (booooo)


But I don't know how long it normally takes for my account to begin displaying any kind of progress:



My CPU usage is pegged at around 750%, which makes sense - but I'm not sure how I'll know if/when they're contributing to anything.
You're using the wrong hash algorithm for Bitcoin mining. Bitcoin uses SHA256d (d = double), but cpuminer (at least the version 2.3.2 on my system) defaults to scrypt (for Litecoin) instead:

-a, --algo=ALGO       specify the algorithm to use
                      scrypt    scrypt(1024, 1, 1) (default)
                      sha256d   SHA-256d


Slush's pool is Bitcoin, so you should add -a sha256d to your command line. You'll see a much higher hash rate (scrypt is intentionally much slower to compute than SHA256) and you'll get yay!!! instead of booooo after some time in your log:

[2013-12-09 21:51:25] thread 0: 49985792 hashes, 832.61 khash/s
[2013-12-09 21:51:29] thread 1: 51072988 hashes, 841.16 khash/s
[2013-12-09 21:52:23] thread 0: 49956628 hashes, 864.18 khash/s
[2013-12-09 21:52:32] thread 1: 50469540 hashes, 808.16 khash/s
[2013-12-09 21:53:26] thread 0: 51850904 hashes, 833.58 khash/s
[2013-12-09 21:53:29] thread 1: 48489516 hashes, 855.40 khash/s
[2013-12-09 21:54:25] thread 1: 46821320 hashes, 834.33 khash/s
[2013-12-09 21:54:25] accepted: 1/1 (100.00%), 1668 khash/s (yay!!!)
[2013-12-09 21:54:25] thread 0: 50014552 hashes, 838.40 khash/s
[2013-12-09 21:54:41] thread 1: 13586032 hashes, 850.75 khash/s
[2013-12-09 21:54:41] accepted: 2/2 (100.00%), 1689 khash/s (yay!!!)


For best results, you should also use the above mentioned stratum+tcp protocol and adjust --threads to the number of cores in the system.