Dapper Drake Ubuntu

I am now using Dapper Drake Ubuntu, installed it last night, got the wireless working well. Went to bed, came out and started the laptop, the wireless adapter was gone! Not in the Networking areas, no where! I went in and reinstalled Dapper, not knowing what I did wrong. Now I have the wireless working well, all I have to do is go to my favorite wireless coffee house and see if I can get it to hook up to the network there. That has been my problem in the past, the inability to hook up to anyone else's wireless network. Keeping in miind that I have the Broadcom 4318 wireless adapter, I would seriously rethink my buying this laptop as I have only been able to get it to work, is with Ubuntu. I am sort of surprised that all of the distributions I have used admitidly is not a lot. FC5, Dapper Ubuntu, SuSe 10, I have not tried Mandriva just yet, but will sometime in the future just to say that I have tried it.
Now on to bigger and better things, I have been working with Blender the 3D rendering program that has been kind of difficult to grasp. I am to the point that I can get a ball to move around the screen fairly smooth, and sometimes get it to bounce. The problem is that it doesn't quite look real as of yet.