Life on the Road - Trucking News Blog

I was having dinner with my family last night discussing an upcoming project here and the question came up of what is a podcast? Being the general technical support for my family and neighbors for years I have been listening to these things for a couple of years now and had figured everyone knew what a podcast was. Then it dawned on me, “What the heck is a Podcast?”. I really had no simple concise, concise answer, in fact I really couldn’t explain it in such a way to do podcasting justice. “Its like a radio show over the internet”, I said, which garnered blank stares, “They are automatically downloaded through RSS feeds”, which left my audience with a who-cares look on their face. So I decided to attempt to come up with something that better reflects what podcast are and the community behind them. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently pulled into a truckstop for a break and fired up a wifi connection and logged into one of the internet providers that broadcast to the parking lot. To my surprise I got a message stating that I exceeded my monthly bandwidth quota and if I wanted to use the net I would have to pay more for bandwidth. Well this struck me as odd since I had used this particular service very little over the previous month so I did some looking into my account. Someone had changed some of the info on my account! I then made a call to their customer service and found I had logged on in Oklahoma City earlier that morning, I was in Indiana, and had been their a couple of days!

So what happened? Apparently I had gotten sloppy in logging on somewhere and had not paid attention whether or not I had an https:// connection or just an open http:// connection. Someone had either sniffed my log on or had used a man-in-the-middle attack to snag my password. I had gotten sloppy and this is what these people are looking for!
Protect yourself, always check that you have a secure SSL connection(https://) whenever you send personal info over a wifi connection and get in the habit of changing your passwords on a regular basis.

Truckstops are a wealth of information to identity thieves, so many of us do business online from our cabs, credit cards and personal info can be easily intercepted by these people. Don’t let yourself become a victim by being sloppy.

Be safe on the road and on-line;
Don Rogers

Surfing the web on a cellphone isn’t always a good experience.  Certain sites can be set up to look pretty good and be very readable on a cell phone’s small screen, Life on the Road is now one of them.

Keep up with the latest Life on the Road news no matter where you are. Using the same URL of http://lifeontheroad.com your cell phone’s browser is automatically detected and you see a version of Life on the Road that fits pretty nicely on a small  screen.

As an added bonus and to save a few keystrokes on your cellphone, we also have a shorter URL - http://lotrtnb.com  Life on the Road Trucking News Blog. Lotr was taken, Lord of the Rings, who would have thought?

Read the latest posts and comments, even leave your comments from your cellphone. Enjoy.

Coming soon, Life on the Road podcasts.

Drivers Daily Log should be a required program for anyone with a computer in a truck. This is more than a computerized log book. It does so much more. I’ve been a user for a several years. When the new rules came out in 2004 and all the changes since then, while everyone else was confused, I always knew if I was legal or not. I mentioned Drivers Daily Log before in my Business Software post, but it’s worth mentioning again in more detail.

Hours of Service

Canada has gone through the same Hours of Service upheaval as we have. If you drive in the US and Canada you have to switch to the Canadian and back to the US rules (and soon Mexico) depending on what country you’re driving in. Canada recently had their Hours of Service rules change and without going into detail, they’re more than a little confusing. The guys at DDL keep all of these rules up to date including rules for intra-state drivers in Alaska, Florida and a few other states that have their own rules for in-state drivers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Awhile back Phil explained RSS feeds and ways to keep up with Life on the Road. In case you’re new and especially new to RSS feeds and readers, here is a video tutorial.

It highlights my favorite reader, Google Reader, and it mentions to be careful because it’s addicting! Get your news, Life on the Road, other blogs and website updates delivered to your screen. You can also set searches in Google or Yahoo or any search engine and keep up to date about specific news or events your interested in.

Sit back, watch, subscribe, enjoy!

VideoJug: RSS In Plain English

Well…mostly foolproof. Over the last few years I’ve probably written several thousand words regarding hotspot security. It’s the subject of the first article I ever had published and I devoted three full chapters to the issue of security in my barely selling book “Over the Road Wireless For Dummies”. Security’s important; especially when, by their very nature, Wi-Fi hotspots are completely unsecured. Because it’s such an important issue I don’t want to minimize the importance of implementing multiple security measures; but there’s one hotspot security tool that I believe to be the most powerful of them all: the Virtual Private Network (VPN).

The Problem

A truck stop hotspot, or, for that matter, any hotspot, is a public network that everyone has access to and, to which, everyone using it becomes a member. When your laptop’s connected to a network there’s a potential for viral infections and hack attacks; not a good thing.

The Solution

A VPN does just what its name suggests; it creates, within the public network that everyone can access, a virtual private network that only you can access. When you’re using a VPN all of your data travels within an impenetrable encrypted tunnel. So…sounds great…but how do you get a VPN of your own? Read the rest of this entry »

You see that icon on the left? Well, of course you do - stupid question - it’s bright orange and I magnified it! This little icon was introduced to the world by the fine folks at Mozilla and it lets everyone know that an RSS feed is available. As a matter of fact, if you look at the top of our column to the right, you’ll see that we’ve got one too. That’s because we want you to subscribe to our feed. We want you to subscribe so badly that we even offer lots of different ways to do so.

Right about now I’m pretty sure that some of you are saying, “What the heck is an RSS feed and why in the world would I want to subscribe to one?” But, even if you’re not, here’s the lowdown: First, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and, second, the best reason to subscribe to our feed, or any RSS feed, is so that you can stay up-to-date without needing to visit Life on the Road each and every day.

Here’s How It Works
RSS, very basically, creates a computer-readable summary of blog, web or news site content. The summary might be just the headlines, the headlines plus a post excerpt, or even the headlines plus the entire post. These summaries can then be read by an RSS Reader or RSS Aggregator.

Here’s What You Need
If you’ve got a “MY Yahoo!“, “My AOL” or “MY MSN” page then you’re all set. All you’ve got to do is click the corresponding button near the top of the right column and follow a few instructions. Same thing for Google and Bloglines. If you’re not already set up with one of them, however, I have a suggestion you might want to look into. I used to use MY Yahoo! as my homepage and I was pretty satisfied with the it. Not too long ago, though, at the suggestion of a good friend, I set myself up with Pageflakes. It does everything that the others do but I like the format a whole lot better; and I can customize the display properties for each flake. Check it out for yourself. It’s easy to set up and if you do a little experimentation you can end up with a really great and really useful homepage.

By the way, if you set yourself up with Pageflakes then all you’ve got to do is click the “Add Feed” button, enter our feed URL - http://lifeontheroad.com/feed - in the text entry field, and click the “Get Feed” button. That’s all there is to it!

Here’s Why You Really Want To Do This
Once you’re all set up with an RSS reader like Bloglines, MY Yahoo!, or Pageflakes you’ll be able to view news headlines, weather forecasts, the content of all your favorite blogs (like Life on the Road!), and a whole lot more, from your personalized home page. Instead of traipsing all over the web you can use one application to bring the web to you. Cool, eh? If you’ve got any questions or comments let me hear ‘em!

Do more than just get directions! Fly over your next delivery address. I hate morning traffic! So, I always try and ask if there is room to park overnight wherever I’m picking up or delivering. But if the office is closed by the time I get the number, I do the next best thing. I look on Google Maps and use either the Satellite or the Hybrid views to get an aerial view of the building I’m going to. A lot of time you can tell if there’s parking or not. Probably not any parking. Pretty obvious there’s plenty of parking. Click on Street View and look at the same map from ground level.

This is only available in a few major cities. They accomplish this with 360 degree camera on a car or a van. As with any new technology there is a bit of controversy, as in this case.

If you’re able to get online before you hit the road, certain cities will have a traffic icon to click on to get real time traffic information like this in LA.

Google Maps does NOT have truck routes or any other kind of truck restrictions. I can get truck route and low clearance information from a hard copy truck atlas. But this is nice to give you a look at unfamiliar turns, roads and possibly bridges. And it may not be the most up to date information. Photos can be anywhere from one to three years old.