Adventures in White Balance

One of my biggest obstacles in my photography in the early days (and today if I'm honest) is the getting

the white balance correct. I didn't even realize to begin with how far off I really was, sometimes I
even thought that the color casts looked pretty cool, giving my pictures some kind of ambiance! Duh!
There are filters and effects for that, you can't do a photograph justice when your white balance is all over the place.

I recently found a great video on You Tube through a site called Photographytalk.com; check it out here.... it's for the D90 but you can get the idea for your own camera. I personally prefer the preset because I feel it gives you a better balance of true color than the little auto settings you can use, but the quick set icons also work really well. I also sometimes use a tip from Ken Rockwell and use the cloudy setting even on a pretty sunny day, works well at least with the D90.
So ignoring the general ugliness of the above example, you can see the difference, the first was on a totally incorrect pre-set that I was using in another room (worked well in the other room btw) and then I quickly flicked it to incandescent light and voila... a truer duplication of the colors in my kitchen. Now if only I had chosen to present this in a more beautiful manner than a Krups toaster and a skanky hairbrush!!!! The monkey's cute tho'.
My point is clear though, if you want to take some lovely pictures you can concentrate on all kinds of details but if your white balance is off your whole pic is shot. Hope you enjoyed this episode of "stuff I sometimes forget about even though it's paramount in good photography!!".
Do you have a little sticking point? feel free to share, we all learn from each other!