Hi aristechmedia,
The easier of the two is to have the title span the full width of the blog column. You'll need to open three php files located in the includes folder of your theme files: format-standard.php, format-gallery.php and format-link.php
In each of these, the structure of the blog type entry is determined. What you'll need to do in each files is search for:
<h1 class='post-title offset-by-three'>
and change it to
<h1 class='post-title'>
This will get rid of the left side padding class for each of those post types.
Regards,
Devin