Al,
Getting the flash off the camera's hot shoe is a must. Once you've done this, you can not only change the angle of the flash relative to the subject, but you can vary the effective power - by moving it closer or further away. You can also bounce the light off the walls and ceiling a lot more easily to help diffuse the light.
I'm not familiar with Nikon stuff to be able to advise on the dedicated lead, but I use a very, very cheap setup of a single contact hotshoe to PC (studio flash) contact adaptor, a 2m PC lead, and a PC to single contact hotshoe adaptor with the flash mounted on it. This latter item has a tripod thread in its base which makes moving it's angle or position simple. The use of single contact off-camera flash leads means you will be stuck with manual mode, but there's nothing wrong with this, you just have to experiment and chimp a lot.
Another cheap way of getting the flash off the camera is to use a "peanut" remote flash trigger, as discussed in other flash technique threads. These can be triggered using the cameras pop-up unit.
You can see the kind of things I'm waffling on about here:
http://www.warehouseexpress.com/inde...kaiseracc.html
Duncan