Fedora16 - Brain dead wireless network manager

[Robert Moskowitz <rgm htt-consult com>]

f16 and gnome 3.  I don't know what ver of Network Manager...

Now I know a little bit about 802.11.  I am currently at the IEEE 802 
wireless interim meeting in Jacksonville, FL.  Most of my time is in 
802.15.9 (I am the chair), but I still attend 802.11 sessions.  That is 
I know something about the guts of 802.11 setup...

So here I am switching between the hotel's questionably usable ESS and 
the conference's ESS.  Of course both have different SSIDs (SSID defines 
an ESS, generally) and each has lots of Access Points many on the same 
channel.  So I am in a meeting room on the VeriLAN SSID.  I suspend my 
system and go to my room to the Hyatt SSID.  The icon shows the SSID 
selected and a signal strength but has 'unavailable' after the word 
'Wireless'.  What is going on here?  There is no easy way to restart the 
connection.  I have to go into Network Settings, turn off wireless and 
turn it on.  ARGH!

Then I am not getting anything to work on the Hyatt SSID, yet it is 
showing 3 bars of signal strength.  But is there any textual info on S/N 
or anything worthwhile?  Of course not.  WiFi is suppose to be used by 
cellphone users that only know to look at bars on their cellphones, so 
that must be good enough?  When you are working on multiple ESSes as you 
will in a hotel (many have a different SSID for the lobby from the rooms 
from the meeting rooms even without the meeting having its own!), you 
need better.  Or at least what I had with f14 and Gnome 2.

Oh, this is on a Lenovo x120e where I see the following in the log messages:

Jan 16 22:16:42 lx120e kernel: [81433.007709] rtl8192c_common: Loading 
firmware file rtlwifi/rtl8192cfw.bin

I would like some help on getting things to work better...