I tend to debug on a device rather than an emulater and depending on which device I'm using., there might be tons of logging which basically makes trace statements unusable. Luckily in Eclipse, it's easy to create a log filter to get rid of the messages I don't want to see.
In debug mode, you'll see the logcat trace down at the bottom and probably a saved filter list to the left of the logging. Click the green cross icon and a dialog will popup with a few edit fields. The two that I use the most are Filter name (which gives your saved filter a name :-) ) and by Application Name which will limit trace to whatever application you want. The application name is basically the package name in your android manifest
manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
package="com.appulearn.coolapp.android"
So I would paste in com.appulearn.coolapp.android
You can also filter out by TAG, and depending on what I have running (like for example a bunch of services) I might create a tag filter which would match the tag name you use in your log.d(TAG, "whoops! error"); statement.
