I had the exact same problem until I bit the bullet and tried out Lightroom.  Now I can download my pics from the card, import them in lightroom (tagging them with appropriate meta data in the process), scan through the imported photos, quickly tag the good ones as "Picks", then go though and post process the picks in just a few minutes.  Export to a web gallery is just a few clicks away.  See for example:  http://www.everythink.org/pictures/Christmas%202007/index.html

I hate to sound like such a "Ra-Ra" Adobe booster, but Lightroom really is that good.

I love the convenience factor, but the very volume of pictures I take ends up working against me.  When I end up with three or four hundred pictures, I don't want to take the time to organize them on my computer (or spend the money to print them), so I just dump them, unlabeled and unnamed, into some random folder on my computer and forget about them

Joshv mentioned Lightroom, and that's an excellent workflow tool (probably the best, actually, though I've heard Aperture gives it a run for its money), but there are other ways to accomplish the job. Lightroom and other professional-level software packages combine and automate the download/file/tag operations, let you quickly rate and cull images, and had basic editing and publishing that cover probably 90% or more of most photographer's needs.

The most difficult part for me (and I suspect most amateur photographers) is to cull my work, but it's absolutely essential to managing a digital workflow. The software I usually use lets me give a 1-, 2-, 3-, or trash- grade to images in a quick slideshow format, and I generally grade/cull in two passes. On the first pass I give a 1 to the obviously awesome shots, a 3 to the ones I wish I could do over, trash to the clearly out-of-focus/bad-exposure/just-wrong shots, and a 2 to everything else. Then I go through the 3s to make sure there's nothing unique there ,* *  and revisit the 2s to see if any deserve promotion to 1 status. After I'm fairly confident that I've got the 1s and 2s right, I demote the 3s to trash and empty the trash.

What I'm left with at that point are 1s, which are either excellent quality or unique enough to deserve sharing, and 2s that are okay shots, but not the best I feel I am capable of. I then go on to edit the 1s according to their ultimate use (email, web gallery, print) by straightening, color correcting, sharpening, and photoshopping as needed. The "publishing" step deserves its own comment(s), and maybe I'll get into it later.

* The third trick is to have a good storage/backup plan.

** I've heard that Aperture's "stacks" function is good for this, but I haven't used it. If anyone here has used Aperture I'd love to hear about it.

There's nothing that beats Kodachrome 25 for a great picture

Consider this (admittedly not rigorous) comparison between the 5-year-old, 11 megapixel Canon 1Ds and Provia 100 film. The digital camera is clearly superior. Then consider that recent digital SLRs (DSLRs) out-resolve the 1Ds and outperform it in other important ways such as color depth.

Still, DSLRs aren't cheap - not even the cheap ones. It's possible to get an inexpensive, but excellent 35mm camera that will take slide film and yield better results than similarly-priced digital cameras. Also, though slide projectors aren't cheap, neither are computers. So. I dunno.

I often find myself wishing I had brought my camera.  But I just never remember to do it.

Jeez, I know the feeling.  How many times I've been out and didn't have a camera with me, I couldn't tell ya, and I have no excuse for that.  I've got 2 digicams and about 5 35mms, 2 of which don't even need batteries.  

Somehow, I never leave the house without my cellphone, but I never have a camera when I need it.  Go figure.

there's only one way to find out...

There could be something wrong with the camera, or its settings.  It sounds like there is a white balance issue. If you are taking pictures without a flash in low light, poor white balance is a common problem with point and shoot digitals.  There are very few P&S digicams that handle low light well.

As for taking good pictures, I don't think there are any hard and fast rules - save one.  You simply have to take a lot of pictures.  And this is the beauty of digital.  Each shot is basically free.  I've got over 20,000 pictures in my library.  Easily 80% of those are crap.  There might be a couple hundred that I consider really good.  But each bad picture taught me something about the camera, or lighting, or composition, etc...