I usually set flash to Rear and reduce it's power by two-three steps, then forget it and use those settings to all my photos taken with flash.
Tape + piece of white paper is one of best investments when doing flash shots, just make it look like old sail ship sail, then adjust power setting, makes quite nice diffuser, if power is not enough, you can always get chip&fish, then use chip on paper to make it semi transparent
Real thing is not too expensive on dealextreme.com , but in case you are cheapskate as I'm.
With flash never use direct illumination, bounce it if possible, it is quite nice toy indeed, had one old film flash, but once it came apart when I was just putting it on shelf, can't really understand how it broke into several pieces without any use of force, but I guess it had time.
Regular white umbrella is quite nice tool too, if you happen to find one, you need just to tape flash inside of that and you have nice 'pro' umbrella flash, might need some playing with to get effect right, but there is world of almost free improvements available to flash.
I took at morning 66 photos and I'm still trying to make panorama out of them, managed to get finally at least some picture, but there are several things wrong within it, more work needed, it is real pain to get 3D panorama from snow landscape, there just are no details, well unique details that is.
)
Much better than paying 200 quid for a Canon flash 
