Driver's Blog

It was a beautiful day, with only one delay, from Interstate 80, a truck fire. I rarely drive down US 15, which is a nice drive through or near towns such as Selinsgrove and Sunbury, PA. US 15 runs along side the Susquehanna River, and stays quite scenic throughout the route to Harrisburg, PA. Eventually, you work your way where US 11 and US 15 connect before Liverpool, and then connects with US 22 & US 322 in Duncannon, PA. There is a Pilot truck stop there, with a great restaurant, called the Iron Kettle. But I found the truck stop & restaurant closed for what looks like renovations.

The the US routes begin to split up from there, and US 15 & US 11 continue a short distance more, before US 11 heads for Carlisle PA. You connect to Interstate 81 before then. If I were to go west, it would take me towards Carlisle, PA; I had to go East, and through Harrisburg, PA. I finally stopped for the day (until 2:00 A.M. the next morning), at a Love’s Truck Stop, in Hamburg, Pennsylvania. Just as I was ready to sleep, the rain clouds from the west caught up, and in less than an hour, the heat was washed away to make it a nice cool night to slumber.

It was a beautiful day.

Depending on how you choose to backup your most files decides how much time it can take. My work files get burnt onto DVD monthly, onto an external hard drive weekly, and a fraction of my work files are duplicated on a memory card daily. Redundancy means never losing everything, or “having all your eggs in one basket”. It also means that I can go from one computer to another, provided that the other computer has the same or compatible software as my computer. It also depends the type of format style I saved my files.  The work files only take twenty minutes on one DVD. Its the other projects that will start after this countdown that can be time consuming.

There is redundancy, a need for times in a pinch or emergency, and then there is repetitive saving that is debatable if  it holds the same importance. For my work files, they are milestones that show updated information through a period of time. But, to copy fixed files that don’t change is not important. It will still happen, but you can make it a guideline to limit it, by how you organize your files, or in the process of how you choose what files to backup.

The day was about the repetitive copies needing to be reduced. Between pictures, videos, blogs, and work, the hard drive space gets used, and even from the beginning of your first backup, making time to delete duplicate copies may be an exercise to consider. My hard drive holds seven years of work files, and I do my best to keep only a month or two of everything that needs no repetitive copies of the other files relating to the above various files. When it comes to exploring video files, they can consume the most space, and needs to be focused upon, and to burn these over and  over again can be time consuming. So, organizing your space, and moving files into other folder locations to know which needs to be backed up just once, as opposed to the others needing that milestone period of backing, may be a suggestion to consider. My only important warning is to first make a backup, and then, organize your files in a different manner. That backup copy will be more familiar at times, when you cannot remember where you moved select files; a milestone in it’s own sense.

For me, I have to plan on multiple video files for the future, which has me moving, and consolidating files, to create more space; deleting those repetitive duplicate files to boot. This is indeed work. Five and a half hours worth of work.

I was delayed at the last customer for almost four hours, before getting to my next place to pick up. Trying to adjust my planned arrival to the next delivery can be daunting for me, until I really am loaded and ready to roll. This was going to be one of those days where I feel more pressured to get to a routine (and every so often a routine means something different). Once loaded, I rolled as far as I could before fueling, and then looked to create that “routine”. The load was going to Michigan, and I was going to have to stop for the night in Franklin, Kentucky, and find another stay over along the way.

It has been a very constraining Contract (my opinion only). Typically, an Independent Contractor can roll and run their own schedule their own way. For me, this contract was already long, and with only several weeks left, I am waiting for the whole thing to unravel, and fall to pieces. The type of contract I signed onto only allowed four days off a month, which was just enough time to go home, get bills and roll again. Over the last two years, I have passed several family members’ hometowns, with no way of stopping in, since the time to deliver and be ready for the next load held priority. So many times they would ask, “When will we see you?” All this, by others, just to own a truck.

When it comes over the “Onboard Computer [OBC]”, I take the time to get all the information into a spreadsheet, all formatted the same for each month previous and to follow. With a Blank Spreadsheet, I started adding in the heading and purpose of every information to follow in rows. In the beginning, I was not sure what I really needed, so those fields (top heading in the first row) was copied from a corporate notepad, and other fields added when there became more than two stops planned.

Although I use a “Driver’s Daily Log” program, along with sending load information through the OBC, the purpose of doing what might be called extra work by copying all this information in separate programs is that the same information needs to be in a format that is specific to who may need to review the information. A D.O.T. officer would need to see this in a log sheet form, while for finance, or submitting information to someone else, would be in spreadsheet form, since they do not need to see it in log form, let alone want to learn a log format.

The Pre Plan also includes the estimated miles and the cost of the specific load. A second spreadsheet (designed more for finance) list the load separate from the Trip Plan Spreadsheet, and I designed it to subtract any fuel stops from the cost of the load, to give me an the amount I am left with as an income. There is also another spreadsheet for truck expenses, such as oil purchases, window washer, etc., and another separate spread sheet for miscellaneous expenses, such as batteries, clothing. There is another expense spreadsheet specific to office supplies. All need to be subtracted from the cost of each load to see an actual amount I earn. The load income spreadsheet is the most used, since the pay of the load, is specific to every load assigned, and fueling is the largest expense to get the load from one point to another.

Like in precious day countdown, I use a map program to plot my needed breaks, and possible stops. Using the map program I can get each leg of my trip down to the hour and minute, and it is accurate to 15 minutes off, depending on how long I travel from one point to another. This all happens while pre planning my trip. As I travel, and things change, I can open the map, add or change stop or locations of breaks, to keep an accurate time frame of my final stop. The preplanning used to be done by estimating the total distance and divide it against a formulated speed. Now the only variance to the software program, is adding an additional 15 minutes for every 250 miles traveled, to compensate for accidents, construction, or any other unplanned stops. Until such time there is a website that tracks construction and traffic accidents nationwide, this is as accurate as I can get to estimating my time, against actual time spent from start to finish.