2. When I run CPAN.pm's shell for the first time, among the list of questions it asks, it wants me to tell it which mirrors to use. In North America, USA, there's about 62 url's from which to choose. Is there some option at this point to simply ask CPAN.pm to ping some of them and automatically select the quickest and least burdened ones?

Some monks here have been working on that — or, in my case: been thinking about it. I think Intrepid actually got the furthest making progress: IIRC he actually got a script to ping CPAN mirrors and then select some.