Trucking

The last few weeks have actually seemed like things are picking up. I actually had a few loads where I was empty one day and loaded the next. So at least I was kept fairly busy. The pay wasn’t as much as it should have been for $4 a gallon fuel, but it wasn’t horrible. For right now, I’ll settle for “not horrible”. Once things get to the horrible level, I’m parking for awhile.

During the days and days of sitting around waiting for loads and since I’m online most of the time wherever I happen to be parked, I came up with a few ideas of making some spare change and not by hanging out at street corners! I’m going into the Internet Marketing Business. That’s a vague term for making money online. There are so many scams out there, I’ve read them all. But with all of the research I’ve done to help Life on the Road perform better in the search engines and gain traffic I’ve decided to see if I can make more money doing it.

Adventures in Web Hosting

Right now I’ve got about 30 websites I’ve either built or planning to build with plans for many, many more. During all of that, I’ve had to expand my hosting requirements. I’m in the process of moving my websites to, not quite a dedicated server, but close. Because of the plan I have, I can sell the space and bandwidth I’m not using to someone else. I’m connected with the best web host with the best support. Right now, I can match and probably beat any web hosting plan out there. Some web hosts advertise unlimited space and bandwidth, in the real world, if you need an outrageous amount of space and bandwidth, you’re not going to be happy on a shared hosting plan. My plan will be cheap, but realistic. But if you need outrageous space and bandwidth we can work something out.

For anyone that wants to move up to a WordPress website, I will install Wordpress, one theme you choose and some of the essential plugins to expand the functionality of WordPress. Plus assist you in moving your content from your old blog. Billing will be by Paypal so I can save you money by not paying for a merchant account. Billing is secure and professional. Tech support is 24/7 (not by me, but you can contact me if you have questions and don’t need immediate help.)

Get Your Websites and Domains Right Here

Any other type of website or blog can be moved and installed if you really don’t want WordPress. You will have complete cPanel access some of the features will allow you to create databases, email accounts with access to your files and directories with a file manager or FTP.

In order to get cheap domains for myself, I’m going to be able to sell domains also at a discount. I’m not going to spend a lot of time promoting web hosting, I need to concentrate on other things, but the opportunity is there if anyone wants to take advantage of it.

I’m still setting things up to be able to actually have customers but should be done soon. If anyone is interested in cheaper web hosting, help getting started with WordPress, on a less populated, better quality server or have any other requirements for your web site, let me know at the normal contact email.

I’ve been neglecting trucking lately. Even thinking about trucking is a little depressing. If I can’t write anything good, then I probably won’t write. I don’t want this to turn into a whine fest, which would be real easy nowadays. But to come out here and have a return trip rescheduled, another trip rescheduled and have a trip offered that paid $1 a mile (thankfully, my office turns that stuff down so I don’t have to deal with those idiots) it gets a little depressing with all of the waiting. Waiting isn’t trucking. Okay, waiting is a part of trucking, but it’s not the good part of trucking.

It’s the Economy, stupid.

I received an email from a Chicago Tribune reporter asking for stories about how truckers are dealing with the high cost of fuel. It’s not the fuel, it’s the lack of freight. It’s the lack of good paying freight, not the price of fuel that’s the problem. Fuel is so high, not because oil cost so much, but because the dollar is worth so little. “It’s the economy, stupid”. Think I heard that from somewhere, long, long ago. Now it’s the stupid economy and it’s stupid politicians that are running our economy stupidly.

Like I told the Chicago Tribune reporter, it’s bad, but not impossible. If you’re dedicated to one or two customers, you’re doing pretty good. If you’re waiting for the leftovers or crap from brokers, you may not be doing as well. Brokers that offer crap for a $1 a mile should be shot. It’s way to easy to become a broker nowadays.

I’m sure the reporter is only looking for a sob story to make into a headline then forget about it. So, I’m pretty sure I won’t be hearing from him again.

McCain Romney Ticket?

I saw a report that Mitt Romney would accept the Vice President if McCain asked him. Since McCain has already admitted he doesn’t know the economy, Romney would be a great choice. Then hopefully he would give him more of a role, then just window dressing, as most past VP’s have been. The Presidency is getting so complex nowadays, there should be a bigger role for a VP instead of waiting for the President to kick the bucket. But with McCain, that’s probably a very real possibility.

…the harder they fall.

Barrack is flying too high on wings of wax right now. Something is going to happen either before the nomination or after, where he comes falling back to earth in a hurry. Like most superstars, the quicker they rise, the quicker and the harder they fall when people wake up. Maybe his preacher will be his fall from grace (get it?) How can you listen to a man for 20 years, be a member of his church, say he’s the inspiration for your book (at least the title) and not hold some of the same beliefs? At the very least, think that his preacher’s beliefs aren’t radical. How can the drive-by media give him a pass for that? Especially after the whisper campaign everyone (including Republicans) got away with about Romney’s religion? For be a Preacher and someone that said he had morals, Huckabee was dispicable for what he did.

On top of all that all of his (and Hillary’s) promises are built on a house of cards and someday soon people will realize that (hopefully). Wake Up America.

Enough Politics

During all of the waiting part of trucking I’ve been building a website and doing some work on the inside of Adventures in Trucking. I’ve been reading on how to make websites better for search engines and about what makes a better blog inside and out.

What’s that Zoom thing?

Part of that process is that Blogging Zoom badge. It’s a new service like Digg, but better. It’s geared more toward blogs and bloggers. Feel free to vote and comment if you feel the site and posts are worthy. You vote by clicking on the badge. You’ll have to register, but from then on you only have to click.

Also, I might be doing some rearranging in the next few days, so if you see something different, hopefully it’s for the better. Let me know in the comments or directly (I get an email every time someone comments, so it’s like the same thing) and let me know what you like or don’t like.

Do you believe that feedburner number? I want to thank everyone for their patience and their support during this tough time. And I thought only my family read this! If I could ask for further support by being more involved in Adventures in Trucking by voting, commenting, and telling me what’s good or bad about the site, I promise to be more involved more on my end.

Ground Zero

Still in southern New Jersey, the wind is blowing the truck back and forth like a boat and it’s supposed to snow tomorrow but stop in the afternoon. Hopefully by Monday night things will be cleared up and I can drive to Allentown tomorrow night and be loaded Tuesday. It’s being loaded by a crew which is good, but most of these kinds of loads, product isn’t ready until the last minute.

I think I’m sticking with this theme. It’s the same that’s used on Life on the Road, but everything works. All the headers, paragraph breaks, photos, comment area, everything works and looks good with no unnecessary stuff. I might change it from two sidebars to only one, I liked the picture on the top banner like the other one, especially since it was taken in Alaska and I may change some of the colors. Since I have all this time on my hands, it will be a good learning experience.

The picture is Ground Zero from my trip to New York City back in 2003. I have a few more I need to post.

Ground Zero

Still in southern New Jersey, the wind is blowing the truck back and forth like a boat and it’s supposed to snow tomorrow but stop in the afternoon. Hopefully by Monday night things will be cleared up and I can drive to Allentown tomorrow night and be loaded Tuesday. It’s being loaded by a crew which is good, but most of these kinds of loads, product isn’t ready until the last minute.

I think I’m sticking with this theme. It’s the same that’s used on Life on the Road, but everything works. All the headers, paragraph breaks, photos, comment area, everything works and looks good with no unnecessary stuff. I might change it from two sidebars to only one, I liked the picture on the top banner like the other one, especially since it was taken in Alaska and I may change some of the colors. Since I have all this time on my hands, it will be a good learning experience.

The picture is Ground Zero from my trip to New York City back in 2003. I have a few more I need to post.

A new WordPress version has come out and I’m going to be upgrading and putting in a few more plug-ins I want to try out.

If anything looks funny today (Tuesday), it’s just me.

Update: I messed something up. May have to start over from scratch. Good thing for backups.

Update2: Holy cow that was fun. After screwing up , reinstalling, then restoring tables, I was distracted and imported Adventure tables into Truckingblog. What a mess. Adventures is fixed and I’m done messing with it for now. Pictures work, the page listing needs a little tweaking, but I can do that later. At least everything works here.

Update3: Okay, I thought everything was working except for some small stuff, but I’ve got to either reinstall everything or rebuild a couple of tables. Nothing is lost. I’m sure it’s something I messed up.

Not sure if I’m going to stick with this theme. I like it and it’s got “widgets” for the sidebar which the other one didn’t. That forced me to learn how the code worked, so it was good for learning.

It’s taking a little longer than I thought, so if things don’t look quite right, please stand-by.

Someone needs to find me a good photo for the top banner. This one is the one that came with the theme and it’s a great picture, but everyone that uses this theme has this picture. I need something different and something that looks like trucking!

A couple of updates to the site - I noticed I didn’t have comments listed on the side, when I was looking for a plug-in to list comments, I ran across this Similar Posts plug-in. Other plug-ins use tags and categories, this one compares the entire posts and looks for similar posts with the same content.

Probably not real important or relevant to this site, but I wanted to see how it looked in case I wanted to use it on another site. I’m not sure if I like both so I may keep looking around for something different.

We are home for the 4rth of July. I heard the strip isn’t going to do fireworks this year. I’m not sure what we are going to do for the holiday.

We have a trip to Minnesota from Portland, OR and I’m pretty sure we have a trip from Vegas to Portland. We should be in Minnesota on the 14th with plenty of time to put the truck in the shop.

We’re still in Maryland at the Flying J in North East, MD. We dropped the trailer, went to Wal-mart and a grocery store. Then drove to Newark, DE and saw Ocean’s 13, it was pretty good. Cindy cooked her most excellent chili today while I took Willie for a very long walk. The weather has been great, we’ve had the windows open and the motor turned off except for this afternoon when it was hotter and more humid than yesterday.

Cindy’s been reading her book and I’ve been working on Life on the Road articles and I’ve made a few changes to Adventures in Trucking. You can now add comments to the photo pages, oooohhhh, aaaaaaahhhhh. And I’ve backed up all everything so we won’t lose our posts or all the changes I’ve been making.

Hopefully we are still picking up on Monday and heading west. It’s not supposed to be a full trailer load, so we might be hanging out one more day to see if we can put on some extra money before going home for a few days to take care of some errands.

We picked up empty plastic tomato bins in Florida that a farm was moving to one of their other farms in Mappville, VA which is on that little piece of peninsula across the Chesapeake Bay from Virginia and Maryland.

We crossed the 15 mile long Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel ($35 for big trucks), parts of it is a bridge then there are parts that go below the water into a tunnel so that large ships can go above the tunnel without having to make a tall bridge or mess with a draw bridge. It would have been cool to see a large freighter go by in between the bridge spans because the bridge parts are right down on the water.

We don’t pick up our next load until Monday, so we’re here for a few days. It’s hot and muggy, but not as bad as Florida. At least we’re going back to Southern California and I’ll be able to get to Vegas and take care of a few appointments before hitting the road again.

More Improvements

On the old site, I had placed Flickr badges on the sidebar when we had a new bunch of photos. That was getting kind of long and it would take awhile to load them all.

Now, I have a listing under Photos of our photo albums, (still in progress, so check back often) which will take you to a separate page with a list of thumbnails at the bottom of the page. Clicking on a thumbnail brings up a pretty cool effect (I didn’t make it, I just installed it here) to view photos. I’m putting any youtube videos on that page also for the same reason. Because it was starting to take a long time to load up all those graphics on the main page if you’re only coming by to read the latest post.

This is going to be the longest two weeks ever! I picked up a load in Connecticut, it only took up about a quarter of the trailer. I sit for two days trying to get more freight with no luck. I take my time going south to Orlando. A couple hundred miles a day, then I’d stop for the night. That’s one week wasted.

Cindy comes in Tuesday night and there’s no load in sight. Which will probably be another week. We might get a room or a car and find something fun to do that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. Good thing I have Willie for company and I’ve been working on this site and I wrote a couple new articles for my other site. I’ve been busy, just not busy doing anything that makes money.

Speaking of this site, now that pictures work and videos work I tidied things up a bit mostly on the sidebar over on the right. The Archive page is pretty cool and I rearranged some other things. The About Us information I moved from a post to a page and changed a little. I’ve started putting categories on all the posts so things appear a little organized.

I should have stayed north and did the entire trip in two normal 10 hour days. At least it would have been cooler. I’m in Georgia and it’s hot and muggy and I have to idle the truck because the a/c on the generator usually has to be charge with a/c stuff at the start of the season and I haven’t been able to get that done. I need a body shop to fix this dent and so we can get to the generator. I probably had the time, but when I’m waiting for a possibility of a load, I can’t put the truck in the shop. Now there’s Willie, a room, the shop. I need to get back to Vegas or Minnesota to take care of this stuff.