Kool Aid Served Daily

I've had 5 plastic and 2 cloth bracelets on my left wrist. I started out with the Armstrong foundation one, way back before most people knew what it was all about. Over time, I've added ones for soccer, baseball, team work (for a 8U baseball team), and the Sooners. I even branched one over to my right hand when I was in Maui.

I'm down in Austin for a group get together and one of the guys presented me with a lime green CoolThreads (tm) bracelet. When I get my hands on a camera, I'll post a picture. I know he might have done it to be nice, but I really view it as a great example of team building.

What it told me was that he was willing to give up something which was his to make a team mate happy. He might have been ribbing me as well, not many business people wear as much plastic as I sport. But when a team is working well, they tend to share, even with new guys.

I was once a manager (by the way, you can get that 1/2 of your brain back when you revert to an individual contributer) and got to distribute swag. A vendor had given us say 10 glasses. The only problem was that there were 11 of us. The solution was quite clear, almost as clear as the nice goblet. I did without.

I'm not trying to toot my own horn here. Yes, this was another example of team building. I never told anyone that I never got one of the goblets.

No, the real point of this revelation is the reaction one of the people had when I gave them the glass: "What, only one? What am I going to do with just one? Get me another." Now this person is still a friend of mine and can be very generous - the reaction was more a product of the times. This occurred right when Dot-Bomb exploded and morale was low.

Both of the objects were cheap, but the two actions illustrate how an individual's attitude and response to swag can effect company morale. The goblet incident was another straw in the camel's back which drove me away from management and the Bay Area. I stayed with that company, NetApp, due to a remarkable display of leadership by two directors. I'll talk about that some day.

The repercussions from the bracelet have obviously not had enough time to be analysed. Right now though, they confirm my choice to join not only a group of people I already knew, but a company whose vision I wanted to share.

Yea, I have my wireless working on my P7010D. I was following Moazam's instructions on getting Solaris running on the P7120D. I went to the Wireless Network Driver for the Atheros 52xx Chipset (ath) and found that the ath driver was now packaged by default since Nevada b29.

And of course it did not work for me. I could see the device, but I couldn't get the driver to load:

# /usr/bin/X11/scanpci | tail
 Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter

pci bus 0x0001 cardnum 0x0c function 0x00: vendor 0x10ec device 0x8139
 Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+

pci bus 0x0001 cardnum 0x0d function 0x00: vendor 0x168c device 0x001b
 Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5006X 802.11abg NIC

pci bus 0x0001 cardnum 0x0d function 0x01: vendor 0x168c device 0xff96
 Atheros Communications, Inc.  Device unknown

I let it go for a bit, I'm at the Austin site and they don't have a big wireless presence. Anyway, tonight I revisited the site and paid attention to the fact that there was a newer version of the driver. I followed the instructions to uninstall the current one, rebooted, and then installed the new version.

# ifconfig ath0 plumb
# ifconfig -a
lo0: flags=2001000849 mtu 8232 index 1
        inet 127.0.0.1 netmask ff000000
rtls0: flags=1004843 mtu 1500 index 2
        inet 198.18.100.185 netmask ffff0000 broadcast 198.18.255.255
        ether 0:b:5d:c3:97:78
ath0: flags=1000842 mtu 1500 index 3
        inet 0.0.0.0 netmask 0
        ether 0:11:f5:86:22:c3

But since the hotel doesn't have wireless, I'll have to wait to later to test the configuration.