Life on the Road - Trucking News Blog

If you spend a lot of time with your laptop computer actually  sitting in your lap, you might want to invest in a pair of Laptop Legs/Mac Feet, made by LapWorks, Inc. Don’t confuse these sturdy legs with the wimpy little things that came with some older models of laptops. Those older legs were thin and flimsy and they often broke apart. They didn’t last long. The Laptop Legs/Mac Feet are much heavier built than the older legs and they can take some abuse, so there’s no worries about stuffing them in your computer bag with your power cord and other gadgets. They also keep your laptop level and steady, so you won’t feel like it’s wiggling around while you’re using it. Couple that with the fact that added airflow under your laptop will help keep it cool and allow it to live longer, and you’ve got a great pair of legs!

One of the worries that a lot of laptop owners have is keeping their computers safe from electrical storms and surges when they take them somewhere else. Not every place has a surge protected for them to use. Now, you can get a surge protector that’s small enough to carry with you but big enough to do what it promises. The Targus Mobile Notebook Surge Protector is both lightweight and compact, meaning that toting it in your computer bag won’t ruin your shoulder. There are two and three prong AC adaptors available, and the Targus will fit almost any laptop. You can use it anywhere in the world, so you can work – or play – on your laptop without fear of electrical surges, anywhere you happen to be.

The D-Link Wireless Pocket Router is a useful device for the modern road warrior. With three different functions it can make life a lot easier for someone who needs an Internet connection when only one Ethernet port is available and in use by another person. Just plugging the card into your computer gives you 802.11g wireless connectivity. If you need a router or need to connect to an existing wireless network you can do that, too, just change the selector switch on the D-Link to handle whichever setup you need. There’s a firewall built in, so your wireless network is protected from malicious attacks, and you can use the D-Link to connect to any wireless network without being required to deal with a complicated software install first. The pocket router is user friendly and if USB power options are not available it can be powered through a standard outlet, giving you virtually no excuse for not doing your work.

D-Link Wireless Pocket Router

Convenience on your key chain

Need to know where the Wi-Fi is? Now you can, with this tiny but durable little gadget that fits right on your key chain without bulking it up so much that it won’t fit comfortably in your pocket or purse. Sure, you can boot up your laptop and look for a signal. You can even walk around or drive around with it, but it’s time consuming and tedious. It’s much easier to just use the mobile Wi-Fi locator to hunt for a signal so you’re not using your bulky laptop and running your battery dead just trying to find a place that’s got a signal you can use. The mobile Wi-Fi locator is not only small, lightweight, and convenient but it also comes with an LED light so that you can see not only that you have a signal but how strong that signal is. You’ll know whether your newly found Wi-Fi is usable before you ever take your computer out of its case and push the power button.

Mobile Edge Wifi Locator

After only 493 days, the merger of Sirius and XM, the nations only two satellite radio broadcasting companies, has been approved. Finally. The thing is, during the months that have passed between the merger request and final approval, a lot of things have changed.

The price of fuel has skyrocketed, the economy has slowed, and a lot of drivers, as well as consumers in general, are feeling the need to rid themselves of expenses deemed “non-essential”. Even if the merger is handled properly, and I have no reason to believe that it won’t be, the merged company will still be fighting an uphill battle to reach profitability.

Most of the people I’ve spoken with, that were opposed to the merger, were opposed because they felt a merged company would stop providing “edgy and innovative” programming. I don’t pretend to have any special insight but logic tells me that the opposite will be true. Consumers have a variety of choices and, considering the fact that some of them are free, I don’t really see how a subscription service can survive in the mobile entertainment environment without actively seeking the edge and pursuing innovation.

Time will tell, and I truly believe that consumers will be well served by the merger but I have to admit, there are a lot of questions yet to be answered. While a June 13 letter to the FCC promised “Programming Options” the companies have only offered this proposal as an indication of the actual options to be offered.

Additionally, there are questions regarding radios and related equipment. Within the merger agreement, the companies are required to open the market to manufacturers. This should bring a lot of great products to consumers but, alas, if you want to take advantage of the pick-and-choose programming, you’re old satellite receiver will likely be relegated to the scrap heap.

The merger’s approved; let’s hope that the combined company becomes stable and profitable by providing high quality programming and a wide variety of consumer options.

It’s been a long time coming, roughly twice as long as the FCC normally takes to perform a merger review, but it looks like a decision is finally on the horizon.

The primary factor in prolonging the review has been the fact that the FCC originally granted licenses to XM and Sirius on the condition the companies never merge; and government regulatory bodies are loathe to make 180 degree reversals. Their thought, back in 1997, was that a merger would stifle competition and result in a condition in which satellite radio consumers weren’t well served.

But the Department of Justice Anti-Trust Division, the folks charged with reviewing proposed mergers, so as to prevent potential monopolies, issued a statement that begins with the following statement:

“Evidence Does Not Establish that Combination of Satellite Radio Providers Would Substantially Reduce Competition”

I’m not entirely sure, with a decision by the DOJ (issued March 28, 2008) indicating a lack of anti-trust issues, why it’s taken so long for the FCC to bring this matter to a head but it may be that they had additional concerns. FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin said, on June 15th,

“As I have indicated before, this is an unusual situation. I am recommending that with the voluntary commitments they (Sirius and XM) have offered, on balance, this transaction would be in the public interest.”

Soooo…just what might those voluntary commitments be?

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Park n View…..latter to call them selves PNV.net was a forerunner of today’s IdleAire

in that it provided communications to trucks in the parking lot. They, like Bear Stearns recently, and Enron a few years ago suffered a liquidity crisis and went bankrupt. Their bubble burst along with the dot-com bubble in the late nineties.

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As I wrote in a previous post. Fuel prices are high and they’re going to STAY high.

And this is a GOOD thing.

(boink!!!!!!!???, this is a good thing? How can that be? Stay tuned, more on that later)

Whatever can we do?

Well, buying a new truck is right out. I checked into that this last month. To replace my old KW it would cost me just about TWICE what I paid for it about nine years ago. Not quite but almost. I paid ninety something thousand in the year two thousand and the local KW dealer wants almost a hundred and seventy thousand for a very similar replacement.

And the new truck get’s worse fuel economy.

So no thank you. I’ll overhaul and rebuild for a while.

How long a while?

That’s kind of what THIS post is about.

Things are being done. It’s possible to get diesel from other places than an oil well,

from plants, algae and trash.

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So many of us have seen the little round domes on the back of the trucks that we have grown accustomed to knowing what they really are, though to the average eye one may think it’s a small flying saucer, it’s actually something to keep tabs on you. Yes, you know what I’m talking about, the dreaded Qualcomm!

I set out on a mission to see if I could find anything about the accuracy of Qualcomm since the “bigger” companies use them to compare driver logs to. I didn’t find much on google (it’s my friend!) other than a bunch of articles on a lawsuit, a ban on the chips that they are using, and what seems to be a feud between Qualcomm and Broadcom.

So how accurate IS Qualcomm? Not very accurate in my book. A good example would be the fact that when my husband called in to get a pickup number that was not sent to him, he was informed he still had 22 hours left before he hit his 70. Funny thing is - by doing an old-fashioned recap (or by using DDL), he was actually a quarter hour away from hitting it. That is a HUGE difference. I wonder if the company would have paid his log book fines based on their “computer” expertise?

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I enjoy digital photography while on the road, maybe more than most. It’s a great pastime for truckers because we always have something different around us for a subject. Family and friends get a better idea of what we do out here when they have a visual to look at too. The cost is relatively low and cameras that shoot RAW format photos are coming well within the casual amateur’s price range. I will explain this odd format that is starting to raise questions among casual users.

When I started reading about RAW, it sounded like a file format for professionals only. You need special software and only higher end cameras would write these files, so I assumed I didn’t need it for what I was doing. I was wrong. The only difficult parts of shooting RAW format photos is taking the extra time to convert the files when you load them to the computer and learning the software that converts them.

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