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Phil Madsen's BlogLearning Something New Every Day |
Truck drivers Phil and Diane Madsen live, work and play on the road; transporting expedited and critical-shipment freight in their custom-built truck. Phil's blog is a blend of travelogue, brain dump and commentary on road-inspired topics.
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Blog entries are made so as not to reveal customer specifics or the current location of the truck when we are under load. Entries are updated to include location information after we leave the area. Blog author Top of page Bottom of page
Today's Topics: Driving our truck in New York City • Truckers going hungry
• I learned today what the 31st floor of a Manhattan office building looks like. Learned by making an inside delivery to it.
Uff duh! Another delivery in New York City. Glad to be out of there with the truck.
I love New York City but driving a truck in there is a challenge. The top photo was taken on our way out of town, using the 3rd Avenue truck route. We are sailing here, going the same direction for over one hundred city blocks. The lights are synchronized, making it possible to drive several blocks at a time, at speeds exceeding 10 mph!
Other streets are more difficult to wind and inch your way through. The bottom photo shows a congested wide street. Not shown are the frequent jaywalking pedestrians that will step out or wheel a baby carriage in front of a truck without seeming to think that the truck might move. Also not shown are bicyclists that like to wind their way between the trucks or hang on to the grab handles on the back of the truck for a free ride.
Notice the school crossing sign above the graffiti-covered truck. When a kid in small-town Minnesota says "I'm walking to school now," his or her parents will hear something quite different than New York City parents hear when their kid says the same thing.
Narrow streets present other challenges. More than once, we have parked the truck on the sidewalks to make deliveries. Others times, we might park several blocks away and walk the freight in because there is no other place to park.
• After we crossed the George Washington Bridge and had the city in our rear view mirror, we headed straight to the Petro truck stop in Bordentown, New Jersey to park and rest. We found the bobtail parking lot filled with expediters.
After a nap, and as the expediters mingling in the lot started talking about dinner, I went into the restaurant and arranged to use the back room to seat a group of 12. In they came. As usual, the always-talkative expediters chatted away. These were new people to us. We had met only one of them before.
Some were doing OK, others were near financial ruin. We bought dinner for one who had no money to buy food for himself. Had we not offered to buy, he would have sat and drank water while visiting with others who ate. Some of the others had money for food but none to give away.
This while Wall Street cheers because the rate of economic decline shows signs of slowing. Should truck drivers cheer too? By Wall Street reckoning, the good news is, truck drivers will still go hungry, but it now takes longer to starve.
Truckers and Wall Streeters think differently. When a trucker looks at his or her gauge, and the tank is 1/4 full, no amount of wishful thinking will make the gauge rise. If you want it to rise, you have to put fuel in the tank.
On Wall Street, it takes nothing more than a dysfunctional mood swing to send stock prices higher; and lower too, of course, but that is where the dysfunction comes in. The bad news is ignored, the good news is bought, and truckers go hungry because Wall Streeters inhale the fumes. Blog author Top of page Bottom of page
Tuesday, June 2, 2009. I learned today truck stories as told by people at a delivery. Learned by hearing them.
We woke up this morning at the Petro truck stop in Bordentown, New Jersey and headed out on today's run. It was a short run going from the JFK Airport to Upstate New York. We have done this run before and completed it in routine fashion.
At the delivery, a larger than normal number of people were waiting for us at the dock. They were in good spirits and chatted away as I unstrapped the freight. Our truck caught their eyes and they offered the usual comments. They then went on to talk about other trucks and truck features that had impressed them, even naming the drivers. It reminded me that shippers and consignees (the people to whom we deliver the freight) sometimes pay closer attention to expediters and their trucks than we know.
We went next to a parking place we know from previous trips and settled in for the night. No offers were received on the way up. We placed the telephone, note pad, pen and calculator at the ready and went to bed. If an offer comes in the middle of the night, we will be ready to consider it. Blog author Top of page Bottom of page
Today's Topics: Learning a new trading platform • Trying to get home
• I learned today more about my new broker's trading platform. Learned by studying it.
We woke up this morning in a retail area in Upstate New York. No load offers were received overnight. After eating breakfast in the truck, we drove to a bookstore parking lot to pass the time and wait for freight. Diane went in to read. I stayed in the truck to use the laptop and study.
Opening a new trading account is a multi-step process. With the account now approved, more account features are available to me. Still more will become available when the check I sent clears. Taking a first look at some of the new features took my breath away and discouraged me at the same time. There is just too much to take in all at once.
I talked earlier about how the big picture of futures and options trading had clicked clear in my mind. If that is the forest, the trading platform is the trees; and there are a lot of trees! This trading platform is huge and overflowing with mind-numbing details. My task now is to become generally familiar with it and focus in on the trees that matter to me.
There are dozens if not hundreds of strategies and techniques that traders use. This platform seems to support all of them. I only need one to start. It will take some time to work my way through the brush and set up my paper (practice) trading place in the forest. I was hoping to sooner begin, but with the huge amount of information there is to absorb, it will be a while yet.
• A load offer came later in the day that we accepted. It is another one day, East Coast run that picks up tomorrow, giving us today off.
Needing to be home (Minnesota) on Sunday, we are starting to care about the direction the freight takes us. It's funny. This load and the last one deliver hundreds of miles apart, but the distance from either delivery to home differs by just a few miles.
After tomorrow's run, we won't accept any loads that take us further from home. Shifting from a direction-neutral approach to direction-specific, our usual price-per-mile discipline will also be abandoned. We will take any load at any price that takes closer to home. The alternative is to drive the entire 1,100 miles at our expense. It may come to that if favorable load offers are not received between now and Friday night. Blog author Top of page Bottom of page
Thursday, June 4, 2009. (Note to the cool hearse driver, your photo is coming to this space soon).
Friday, June 5, 2009. No blog entry today.
Saturday, June 06, 2009. I learned today that "Sputnik burned up in the atmosphere, Berlin is now one city, but 25 years later, the Soviet-designed Tetris remains one of the most popular and ubiquitous video games ever created. It has sold over 125 million copies, been released for nearly every video-game platform of the past two decades and even been played on the side of a skyscraper." Learned by reading an article on Time.com.
I have never heard of Tetris until today and only learned of it by seeing it commemorated in Google's logo on its home page.
I have been thinking recently about the vast difference there is between the reality we know and the reality we don't. Tetris is a case in point. It seems to be a big deal worldwide and, until now, I was unaware that it even exists. I think of myself as a reasonably intelligent guy, but given the vast amount that I don't know, that is an arrogant assumption.
As we drove through scenic Eastern Pennsylvania yesterday,I saw a lot; hills, trees, rock formations, other vehicles, the people driving them, various construction projects, the sky, the paint used on the roads, the material that makes the signs reflect at night, and much, much more. I could write for days describing the people and things that are in a single scenic view. I could further describe that place on the earth, its position in space and time, its meaning to me and others ... I could write and write and write.
What intrigued me, however, was not what I could say, but what I could not. While it might take me days to write about what I knew, it would take years to write about what I don't. For every little bit we know, there is so very much more that we don't.
Pennsylvania is now behind us, as is Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin. We parked the truck in our driveway this afternoon and are now home for a week. Blog author Top of page Bottom of page
Sunday, June 7, 2009. No blog entry today.
Monday, June 8, 2009. We are home for a week or so. Diane is taking continuing legal education classes to keep her law license up. I will be puttering with the truck, writing, trading (trading page was updated today), and developing a workshop presentation that I will be giving in July at the Expedite Expo. Together, we will catch up on our business bookkeeping, visit friends and go out on a couple of dates.
Blogging will resume when we return to the road sometime next week. Blog author Top of page Bottom of page
Thursday, June 18, 2009. I learned today about the new camera we purchased. Learned by reading the instructions.
Having stayed home longer than we planned last week, we are on the road again.
We received a load offer three hours before we were scheduled to go back in service. No other trucks were available to haul this load. Dispatch called to see if we could go into service immediately and roll on this ASAP pickup.
The truck was not ready to roll and neither were we. Dispatch worked out a later pickup with the Iowa-based shipper and we agreed to do the run. It is a 400 mile run that will deliver late tonight or tomorrow morning; a nice, easy run that gets us back in the groove. Blog author Top of page Bottom of page
Friday, June 20, 2009. I learned today that Schneider National, a major trucking company, has eliminated paid holidays for its company drivers and imposed unpaid one-week furloughs on all office people, including executives. Learned by reading The Trucker newspaper.
The recession continues and the trucking industry is providing no indication that things will turn around anytime soon.
We delivered a load near Chicago this morning and spent the day waiting for freight. No acceptable load offers were received. We may end up spending the weekend here.
Before we went to bed, severe storm warnings prompted us to move the truck to higher ground and away from trees and utility poles. Storms producing 70 mph winds were headed our way and a flash flood advisory was issued.
The weather alert alarm on our CB radio went off several times with warnings and such. This is a nice feature to have. Even if the radio is turned off, it will sound an alarm if severe weather is headed our way.
As things turned out, the storm dissipated before it reached us. We returned to the better parking place and enjoyed a peaceful night's sleep. Blog author Top of page Bottom of page
Saturday, June 20, 2009. I learned today about an all-electronic U.S. trading market that I probably don't need to know much about. Learned as I continue my trading studies.
As mentioned earlier, there is a lot of ground to cover (including hundreds of user manual pages) before I begin using my new broker's trading platform. Most of it has little to do with the kind of trading I intend to do, but to get to the stuff I will use, I have to at least touch on the stuff I won't
I'm trying to put at least two hours a day into this and can do much more when we are not running. Good progress is being made.
We woke up this morning at a Wal-Mart store in the Chicago area and are waiting for a good load offer. As of 10:30 a.m., the Qualcomm unit has been quiet. Blog author Top of page Bottom of page
Today's Topics: Our activities this week • Microsoft free is the way to be!
I learned today more about trading. Learned by studying and practicing for three hours.
• Wow! where did the week go? I did not blog last week because the keyboard on my computer died. The right half worked fine but the left half was dead. Diagnosing and replacing it was easy enough but the delay, other work piling up and the expedite work we did backed me up.
We spent the weekend and Monday waiting for freight in Chicago and ran a load from there to New Jersey. The next load took us from Queens (New York City) to Morgantown, West Virginia, where we delivered yesterday. That is not much freight but the timing of the runs was such that sleep time needed to be worked in during the days. We did not get the free time that low number of runs would normally provide.
We are dispatched now to pick up a load tomorrow and deliver it on Monday, 1,900 miles away. It's a good run but it delivers far from a busy freight center. We may regret taking this one. Time will tell.
I put a fair amount of time into trading this week, but much more into computer work, completing my pieces for the next edition of Expedite NOW, and working on an application for some grant money.
The state of Minnesota is giving away money for certain truck emissions reduction devices. While we are eligible for the grant, I don't have high hopes of receiving any money. Applying for it was worth the bother, but the application took a lot of time to complete.
The keyboard failure got us thinking about our second laptop as we used it (my web site software is on this computer, not that one, thus the blog break). We decided to buy a better laptop. I used the Dell web site to build a computer that would meet our needs. Just as I was typing in the credit card number to buy it, Diane spotted a closeout sale in the newspaper that offered about the same computing power for half the price. We drove to the store and paid $380 for that computer instead. Not bad!
That's where the rest of my time went this week; into setting up a second computer, teaching this one to talk to it and teaching both to share the same internet connection. That way Diane and I won't have to argue anymore about who gets to be online. We both can be online at the same time, each on our own laptop. Diane is loving it that the new laptop is her computer. Now she will be the one with the latest and greatest and I will be the one on the slow machine.
Setting up our in-truck, two-computer wireless network is prompting a lot of computer maintenance and setup on my computer that has been overlooked for too long. I may be on the slow machine now but there are things that I can do to speed it up.
• It also pushes me over a line I have been wanting to cross for a long time. I am setting up both computers as dual boot machines that will run both Windows and Linux (Ubuntu) operating systems. I have been migrating away from Microsoft products over time. Ubuntu takes me further along.
I can't make the statement yet but am getting close to saying that I will never again pay for a Microsoft product. I have had it with their stream of products that go obsolete. Over and over again, they have introduced the next big thing, only to make sure it dies on the vine when their next big thing comes out.
When Microsoft killed FrontPage, I did not migrate to their next great product. I went to Dreamweaver instead. I stopped using Outlook before they killed it and now use a web-based, online service for e-mail and contact management. So too with other products. If it says Microsoft, I get rid of it if I can and watch for new alternatives if I can't.
Now I am making the operating system move, away from Windows and on to Linux. Windows 7? Who cares? Diane and I are Linux people now. Microsoft Office? No way. OpenOffice.org is free of charge (as is Ubuntu) and provides everything we need in an office suite. Windows Explorer? We dropped it a long time ago in favor of Firefox.
I have had it with product support that dies before the computers do on which the products are installed, endless hours of reboots and bug fixes, and bloatware that fills my drives and RAM with crap I don't want but Microsoft insists I take.
The only reason I am setting our laptops up as dual boot machines is so we can use a few Windows-based applications that will not yet run on Ubuntu. Manufacturers of those programs should know that we will replace them as soon as good Linux alternatives are available. We are DONE with Microsoft! Now that we have crossed the operating system hurdle, Microsoft free is the way to be! Blog author Top of page Bottom of page
Saturday, June 27 2009. I learned today about Dreamweaver's Flash Image Viewer. Learned by reading about and experimenting with it.
I call him "Blogger Bob." He is another expediter who blogs on this web site. He has a series of photos he wants published and I need to develop this site a bit further to get that done.
Dreamweaver is the site development software I use. I'm reading the image viewer instructions now. People like photos and this site has been without them for too long. With the spare time the run we are on will give us, I hope to fix that.
Today is a glorious day! We picked up freight early this morning and are driving it cross-country now. The weather is great for driving. The sun is shining out of a blue, partly cloudy sky. The winds are mild. The days are long. It feels good to be driving on a long run like this. It has been a while.
We will keep the truck rolling until tomorrow night, when we will park near the delivery and wait until Monday to unload the freight. This gives me time to add photo features to this web site and learn more about trading.
In addition to working on the web site, I have used some of my time today to read and re-read some of the hundreds of pages of instructions that go with my trading platform (a computer program used to view market data and make trades). There is a lot to learn but I am making good progress and am very pleased with how this is shaping up. If I can't successfully trade with this platform, I can't successfully trade at all. It is no longer about finding the right tools. I have them. It is now about learning how to use them well.
The sun has not yet set yet but I'm off to bed now. Diane will drive for a few more hours. Then it will be my turn. Blacking out the sleeper will help me sleep. That can be done with inserts we have for the windows. Some drivers do it the easier way and simply put on a blindfold.
Nighty night! Blog author Top of page Bottom of page
Sunday, June 28, 2009. I learned today about the oryx. Learned first by seeing some in the wild (in New Mexico!) and then reading about them online. (Click here for photo. You have got to see this!)
Greetings from New Mexico, where we are parked for the night and waiting to deliver a load tomorrow morning. We are in a remote area of the state (some would say the whole state is remote). As we drove down a quiet desert road earlier today, we could not believe our eyes when we saw a group of strange animals staring out at us from the sagebrush.
WHAT is THAT?! I exclaimed. Diane was as dumfounded as me. We have never seen anything like it, not even in pictures. We learned from a local resident that the animals are oryx. Native to Africa, they were introduced into New Mexico in 1969, and grew to their present population size of 6,000. You can read more about them here.
We have seen some great sights since taking up life on the road in 2003. Today's oryx sighting was a joy that reminded us why we are still at it. The slow rate of business that the recession brought on makes it easy to dwell on the money and get into a gloomy state of mind. Then, while driving along, and without warning or any hint of what was about to happen, we make totally-unexpected eye contact with a group of oryx and feel good about the business all over again.
We did not get a photo. We were so surprised, confused and delighted by the sight that neither one of us thought about the camera. A photo will not be needed. The sight of those brilliant faces staring out at us from the green sagebrush and mesquite is one we will remember forever.
Today was a full day of driving and sleeping in shifts. I did not get the web site work done I had planned to do. That will have to wait until tomorrow.
We will get a good night's sleep tonight in a parked truck. A cool desert breeze is blowing through the open windows of our sleeper. It would be a fantastic night for star gazing but the sky is cloudy. We will instead go to sleep tonight with visions of oryx in our heads. Blog author Top of page Bottom of page
Monday, June 29, 2009. I learned today how to put a slide show up on this web site. Learned by doing it (see it here).
I have way more projects and lifelong learning tasks to complete than I will ever get done. One of them is to get good at web site development. This web site is a hobby on which I plink away as time and interest permits. Progress is slow, but, hey, it's a hobby, not a job. The latest step forward is learning how to put up a slide show; a satisfying bit of progress, if I say so myself.
We delivered freight this morning near Las Cruces, New Mexico. This being a remote area and with the Fourth of July weekend approaching, we were ready to get out of here at almost any cost. After checking around, we decided to take the deadhead pay dispatch was offering and head to Los Angeles.
We took I-25 south to I-10 and headed west but not get far. A load offer was received that paid $0.20 a mile less than the rate we normally charge but we took the load. That pay was much better than the deadhead pay to Los Angeles and it got us out of New Mexico.
I absolutely love driving in the American Southwest. The roads are good and the scenery is spectacular. Today, the sky is blue with bright white summer clouds. Driving doesn't get any better than this.
Diane is driving now. I had my turn earlier in the day. I'm in the sleeper. After posting today's blog entry, I will put a couple hours into trading and go to bed. We pick up our load at noon tomorrow but will be driving late into the night to get there.
Soon after she started driving, Diane got a dashboard message saying our left front, low beam headlamp is out. We carry spares and they are easy to change. I'll do that before going to bed, and before dark, of course. Blog author Top of page Bottom of page
Tuesday, June 30, 2009. I learned today more about trading. Learned by reading as Diane drove.
We are on a run that picked up in Denver, Colorado today and delivers tomorrow 1,100 miles away. Other than driving, sleeping and a short, garden variety thunderstorm punctuated with 55 mph wind gusts, there is not much else going on. Blog author Top of page Bottom of page
Blog entries are made so as not to reveal customer specifics or the current location of the truck when we are under load. Entries are updated to include location information after we leave the area. Blog author Top of page Bottom of page