Future Timestamp Posts and Pinging

Crap!! I have been pinging all my ping sites every couple of minutes when I add posts then!

How likely is it that my blog got banned because of this? Is there a way to check and see if it is banned?

So do people just turn off pinging when they add a bunch of posts at once?

Is there some program or plugin I can use to fix this?

Might work doesn’t sound to re-assuring. How do I manually check to see if my ping was successful or not?

Is there any stand alone program which I can use to ping my blog?