there's pretty much only three things on that list you need to be concerned with:
most important is making sure your white balance is set. there's probably a bunch of different presets on yours, like one for "sunny" and "indoor" or it might even be "flourescent" and "tungsten". just play with them and see what works best; it's pretty easy to get assy shots even using the "correct" white balance setting.
ISO is the same as your film speed - it's the sensitivity of your CCD. 400 and up is good for outdoors stuff, but you want to keep it as low as possible to avoid crunchy grain (read: ugly, ugly jpg noise)
f-stops are... kind of tricky. if your camera has a light meter built into the viewfinder, adjust it until the arrow lines up with the center point (or close to it, sometimes I like to underexpose stuff). BUT there's also another factor to consider - shutter speed. your shutter speed is going to influence your aperture (f-stop) setting - the faster the shutter moves, the less motion blur you get. conversely, a fast shutter means less light makes it through to the image plane, so you have to open your aperture (which is done, crazily enough, by <i>reducing</i> your f-stop number). here's an example:
lets say you're trying to photograph a city street - you want the cars to be blurred a little to give a sense of motion, so you'll need a slower shutter speed (slow shutter = fast moving things look streaky). it's kind of overcast daylight, so let's say (because i'm too lazy to look up reference numbers) you decide on 1/60 (or "120", same difference, just put a "1/" in front of it), and after looking at your light meter you decide to set your aperture at (what the hey) f11.
now you're at the zoo and you want to get a shot of a pretty critter (lets say it's an ocelot, why the fuck not), and it's moving around a lot, so you'll want a faster shutter speed - let's call it 1/500. so now you'll get a shot of it without blurriness - BUT WAIT!! if we leave the f-stop at f6, we'll see bupkis. so we have to increase the size of the aperture, by moving to a smaller f-stop. kind of helps to think about both the shutter speed and the aperture as fractions - f6 is 1/6 the size of the fully open aperture, so f2 (1/2) will let more light in because it's a bigger fraction of the size. totally counterintuitive, I know. but compared to the above street example, your ocelot shot is going to need something more like f4 or f2.8
so yeah. that's pretty much the crash course in non-suck photos, as far as I understand it. I am not a photographer, I only play one on tv, please consult your manual. also, <a href=http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Photography-Book-Scott-Kelby/dp/032147404X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242280584&sr=8-1>this book</a> is also concise and really helpful
lol yeah i took half of a photo course in college (my minolta, while well-loved and well-tended, had a tendency to chew up film which made doing projects rather impossible) so i'm all set on shutter speed and aperture settings etc. i just didn't know if there was some special photo trick about thinking digitally about color that i missed out on. after i posted this i googled a while and found <a href="http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials.htm">this</a> site, which looks to be quite useful.
my kodak isn't quite as sexy as that (canon?) dSLR you had at 'con, but it offers a bit more control than your standard point-and-shoot.