Life on the Road - Trucking News Blog

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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There is much debate with Linux concerning it’s usability for common people. The install pretty much puts folks into 2 categories - the Linux sucks crowd and the Linux is awesome crowd. I would be in the Linux sucks crowd.

The reason Linux sucks is that nothing works easily and you have to relearn computing. I have things I want to do on the computer and configuring the computer is never on the list. Right from the install you will have problems and you’re only reasonable resolve is to go to forums and search. If you ask any uneducated questions they’ll tell you to read the manual and that you lack intelligence. The “manual” is a mind-boggling reference that is as loosely put together with non-descript terminology as the forums. It’s not that Linux itself sucks, it’s that it is a highly unfinished project. It works great once you jump through enough hoops to make it work. If you can get a piece of software to work in Linux, the performance gains will make you want to forget about Microsoft, even when you’re using Microsoft programs on Linux.

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An exercise in speculation, otherwise known as dreaming.

The other day I was surfing WikiPedia. (what? you don’t do that?) and I came across this:

Gas Turbine

extracts energy from a flow of hot gas produced by combustion of gas or fuel oil in a stream of compressed air. It has an upstream air compressor (radial or axial flow) mechanically coupled to a downstream turbine and a combustion chamber in between. “Gas turbine” may also refer to just the turbine element.

Energy is released when compressed air is mixed with fuel and ignited in the combustor. The resulting gases are directed over the turbine’s blades, spinning the turbine, and mechanically powering the compressor. Finally, the gases are passed through a nozzle, generating additional thrust by accelerating the hot exhaust gases by expansion back to atmospheric pressure.

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………well maybe not.

However….lately there’s been a whole lot of talk about how bad it is in the trucking industry. This is no doubt true. That being the case I find it highly interesting to run across the following articles on various websites.

A World Without Trucks

Chicago’s Freight Subway does the work of 5000 Trucks

Roadless Trucking for the World

And the favorite of Science Fiction readers from way back….

………..The Driverless Car. ……with a driverless truck to follow shortly.

Trucking is changing rapidly. High fuel prices are lending impetuous to those changes. Individual truckers are caught in the gears.

What other impending changes are below the radar?

Adding your photos to a blog post, web page, ebay, etc. can be a little tricky. You cannot just upload the image file that comes right from the camera because the file size is to large to be practical. You need to downsize the image with Photoshop, Gimp, or other photo editing software. It’s time consuming and sometimes you do not get the desired results. There’s an easy way to have near perfect web ready photos and it’s free. Read the rest of this entry »

The horror:

I dunno if you all have noticed it or not but today’s truck is a technological nightmare, what a convoluted, hayseed, thrown-together adhoc mess. It would make Rube Goldberg proud. I was sitting in my lawn chair the other day smoking a ceegar and looking at my truck …drip, drip oil onto the drive way..(it’s not leaking….it’s just marking it’s territory)…
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I just ran across a study……….it’s a PDF.

If I read it right their conclusion is that “significant” increases in fuel mileage can be accomplished by improving Aerodynamics. Interestingly enough they also conclude that 60 % of the truck-trailer combination aerodynamic drag is due to the trailer.

Well that leaves me out. They’re talking about a van. I pull company trailers but they are all some variation of a flatbed.

However…this article says……” Improved fuel efficiency by 45% ”

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I found this article concerning the use of high-tech for dispatching interesting. Even smaller companies are realizing the value of technology in trucking. However, they only realize it from a dispatch point of view.

For less than the cost of one truck, this company has upgraded their ability to service customers and keep track of shipments. I would guess they will see a return on investment very quickly.

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