I must have watched a video of an older version of WordPress, because the dashboard is in Site Admin (in the version I have) and write a post is in Posts / Add New. Something I didn’t see in any of the articles or videos on the install, which is pretty easy, btw, is that it may take more than the default 30 second timeout that is specified by PHP ini. I increased mine to 90 seconds to make sure the install finished properly.
Something to note, also, but the instructions in the readme.html file, included with the wordpress installation, do not say anything about making a database for the wordpress installation. Plenty of other documentation out there to alert you to that, but I guess they figure if you know anything about MySQL at all, you’ll know to create the database (without being told). Still, I wonder why they didn’t automate it the way they did the creation of all the tables?