Sleeperberth Cast

I must confess: I am a Twitterholic! A slave to the obsession that has consumed so many participants in the present state of social media transported over the “tubes” that make up the “internets”. So while recovering from surgery to repair an abnominal epigastric hernia, my use of Twitter became more of an annoyance than while I am out driving my routes. My patience with Twitters reliability or more accurately, its lack of reliability, wore thin. I don’t claim to be an early adopter. I think I would be more accurately labeled a second wave adopter or simply put, a follower of those early adopters. Regardless, I do like to share my experiences as I try new technologies or new ways of using technologies in hopes that someone else will find it useful. After all, not everyone is connected in this current age, though we are getting closer to that reality. What then occurs is a need to manage that connectivity to a point so as to maintain a modicum of sanity so that one doesn’t experience information overload. With this last point in mind, I must confess, I would have more quickly adopted this strategy if I hadn’t felt it would overwhelm me with said data.

Sources
I’ll post the sources I used for your reference and also in the likely hood that these are more concise and easier to understand than my attempt at making this post a simple step by step so that your transition can be completed easily. Yes, I am wordy, so for simplicities sake, skip on down to the step by step following this break. Dave Slusher - who upholds the philosophy that one doesn’t need twitter and that digital life would be easier if you migrated over to Friend Feed completely. Paul Reynolds who takes a more moderate philosophy of a live and lets keep playing with the dead man in the room that brought us all together in the first place. And I would be remiss in not including Dave over at TrailerLife who joined me in this journey, participating in the experiment to try and make his digital life more manageable and also because he beat me to the punch by writing about it first. You may find his blog more direct and easier to follow.

The problem I found with the sources is that some of the links were out of date. By the time you read this the links I have posted maybe out of date as well. Thus is the state of technology, Ever evolving. Now, on to the steps..

First Step
Simply open a friend feed account if you don’t have one already. Go ahead and add services to your feed if you are so lnclined. It does have a tendency to spit these feeds out in their entirety once you add them. such as Youtube, Netflix, etc.

Second Step
Use your OpenID account to open a Twitterfeed account. Then enter in your Friend Feed atom feed into Twitterfeed and at the end of it add the &service=internal flag. This is important. I’ll explain in the next step. Your friendfeed feed should look like this http://friendfeed.com/yourusername/?format=atom&service=internal

Getting Closure
Finally you simply start posting from Friend Feed, or if you like using a service such as Ping.fm then make sure you either turn this twitterfeed off (it can be turned on and off very easily) or don’t include friend feed in your services that you post to from Ping.fm. If, and this is important to prevent double posting, you have the twitterfeed turned on then you want to remove twitter as a status service to friend feed. Otherwise you will double post to twitter.

I’ll try and keep you updated as to how it evolves.. and of course, share with me what you find and we will all keep updated as it rapidly becomes a tool that allows us to share with a greater efficiency our lifestreams with friends and big brother. After all, why not make it easier for Big Brother to see what we all are doing. Aren’t we all good citizens?

The Sleeperberth’s Suzuki

Originally uploaded by crosseye_.

While at home this last week for a day, Mrs. C and I decided to attempt to go a bit greener. Of course this won’t be an all season solution to the problem, but it does point us down the right path. Apparently the trucking industry is finally getting ready to roll out their initial efforts in riding the green wave. Wal-Mart is ordering a hybrid 386 Peterbilt with plans on growing their fleet with these trucks to increase fleet efficiency by up to 25 percent over the next few years.

The Hybrid technology utilized on this truck is designed by Eaton Corporation. The system (called Eaton Hybrid Power System) retains energy generated by the engine, which would normally be lost during braking, and stores it in batteries for later use. That electricity is then sent through the motor/generator and blended with engine torque to improve vehicle performance, operate the engine in a more fuel-efficient range for a given speed and/or operate only with electric power in certain situations. This innovative process has been shown to increase driving efficiency by 5-7 percent. The system’s batteries even power the heating, air conditioning, and electrical system when the engine is turned off. The improved miles per gallon, combined with the reduction of idle time, could result in approximately $9,000 in annual fuel savings based on an average cost of $2.50 per gallon.

Though the trucking industry emits a smaller percentage of carbon emissions comparatively with Building and Other Industry than what is commonly believed. We do work in symbiotic accord with these groups. They need us as we need them. Thus it is good to see some technological progress on this front as well towards the stabilization of climate change and in general just good breathing.

Googlefight

Originally uploaded by crosseye_.

While I am waiting for a load, which amazingly is taking the load planner forever, I caught up with some of my videos on my hard drive, one of them being DL.TV. On todays episode they featured Googlefight. This website uses a google api to compare two different searches. So, I went and for the fun of it entered myself in along side my Arch Nemesis, Trucker Tom. The results completely caught me by surprise. Take a look and enter your own Arch Nemesis in the Googlefight search engine to see how you rate.

Hurry up and wait! Thats the way of the truck driver as well as the soldier. After hustling to make it from my pick up in PDX to my delivery in Grand Forks, ND by Wednesday so I would not have to sit over Thanksgiving to deliver on Friday, I end up sitting in Fargo waiting to drive to Schuyler, NE to pick up a load going Kentucky bound.

Now, I find it harder and harder to be unproductive and so I got to searching around for plug ins for Firefox. First one I installed as an addition to the many fine ones already installed (I may cover those at a latter date) was Foxmarks which is a Bookmarks Synchronizer and in the same category I installed Bookmark Duplicate Detector.  Foxmarks has become almost a necessity since I now run multiple platforms on the two PC’s that I have in my truck, not to mention my PC’s at home.
You simply sign up to the Foxmarks site and Sync up Baby! BDD is as nearly necessary but I only needed to use it once and on only one OS. I am simply a total bum when it comes to organization.  Extremely lazy, I am. The bookmarks were relatively as humongous a mess as the Sleeperberth Studios.

The final plug in (so far) that I have installed over this Thanksgiving Down Time is Deepest Sender. This is simply a blog extension/add on that works with Blogger/Wordpress/LiveJournal. This will be my first post using the plug in.

Finally, a little side note is, I have finally taken the plunge and upgraded my desktop to IE7. What little time I have spent using it has demonstrated to me that IE has finally matured, yet the power of Open Source still shines with the broad range of plug ins available for use in the Firefox browser. Even if IE7 does start to make development tools available for creating plug ins, which is entirely likely since there is this IE7 plug in site in beta, they continue to march down the path of playing catch up.

Screenshot

Originally uploaded by crosseye_.

Caterpillar Trailer

Originally uploaded by crosseye_.

Swish sent me this picture. A new type of trailer that is capable of hauling two separate containers. Thanks Paul.

It is a joy to be held up at home when truck problems occur. In fact it is in my opinion very good management to be able to schedule downtime for truck repair while taking a break from the daily and somewhat lonely lifestyle that is the very essence of the trucking industry. Yet, when the few days scheduled for maintenance and warranty updates on the truck turn into weeks, it is very difficult to patiently sit back and say to ones self, “Ah, thats no problem. At least I’m at home.”

As has been stated by many other drivers, to much downtime is very detrimental to the state of being for truck drivers. Many are the causes for too much downtime. And some of course are more negative than others. You have downtime due to lack of loads as Wayne mentions and you have your more serious issues that arise like Bill & Kathy experienced. But when it is due to defective design, the truck manufacturer has the responsibility to make certain the customer is happy. That begs the question of what is essential to make the consumer “happy”. If you are a company driver you simply accept the pay that your company contract states is the detention pay which can be anywhere from $50.00-$100.00 a day. That same detention pay is different for both the leased driver and equally different for the O/O which depends solely on the company leased to or the broker he/she is contracted with. It really should be a higher amount but as an independent driver things happen a bit differently. The company I am with has a review board that you have to go before so as to be paid any kind of compensation. If it is not feasible for you to be able to pick up an abandoned truck or one that is unseated (of course these latter are parked at company terminals).

Recent experience has lead me to be skeptical of an adequate recompense based on promises made by customers contracted with a trucking company. The practice is for the trucking company to act as a negotiator for the driver and they are not an adequate representative due to their capitalistic viewpoint coupled with the understandable need to satisfy the stockholders. So the current paradigm is such that the driver who in this case is the financial fly in the ointment is the easily dispensable commodity.

Though Unions have proven to be a more adequate representative for the driver in the past, and still have a good foothold in some aspects of the freight business, there are many factors that lead to the foreseeable demise of its involvement. Events happen that mark an organization as less effective in its power to effect change and as pertains to the Union these events include corruption and ties to organized crime as well as one of the most recent actions that in May 20 of 1999 forced NationsWay Transportation Services to close its doors instead of caving to Union demands concerning Pension agreements, costing roughly 3000 workers to lose their jobs.

Due to the very competitive nature and the differing paradigm that the trucking industry creates, there needs to be a new labor movement that would help to assure good wages for service rendered as well as an allotment for the driver taking that forced vacation not planned for. Possibly a professional negotiator whose stake in the negotiation is to be paid for benefiting both drivers and the trucking companies they driver for. And since most of the labor laws actually preclude drivers (the average driver makes anywhere from $2.00 and hour to $6.00 figures based on the actual time spent on the job yet not considered working) a working model of labor reform is needed.

Until such time as drivers are actually able to bond together in some form of alliance to agree on the formation of such a negotiating force or service, most of us will from time to time have to suffer this downtime curse that has forced the end of many a drivers career prematurely.

I have my podcast hosted on both Libsyn and Slapcast and then redirect them through this blog’s feed. It has become a practice I am glad I got into and would encourage any other podcasters to take up a similar strategy. Because Podcasting (or Netcasting, SyncCasting, Truckcasting or whatever it will eventually morph into) is a paradigm of which its very backbone is such a tenuous and continually evolving technology, it is by its very nature next to impossible to predict its next metamorphosis.

I learned that Libsyn has been purchased by Wizzard Software which states its forward looking strategy to be, that:

Over the next 12 months we plan to continue to execute our current business plan, focusing our efforts on speech technology business solutions for programmers and enterprise businesses interested in incorporating and using speech technologies for their workforce and in their products and services. We plan to continue to expand our efforts in attracting customers to use our VoiceTools product line as well as our customized programming and consulting services through the leads we generate by distributing our Voice Tools, IBM’s OEM ViaVoice desktop products and AT&T’s OEM Natural Voices desktop and telephony products, on a worldwide basis.

I’m not clear as to what or how this strategy influenced their decision to purchase Libsyn or Switchpod, which is another podcast host. Apparently wizzard software feels that:

this new podcast service network will lead the industry by offering competitive advantages to both the podcast community, as well as becoming an attractive new medium for the advertisers and sponsors.

Since they have made the purchase coincidentally Libsyn has had numerous slowdowns and 404 errors over the halloween weekend. In fact I have not been able to download any podcasts hosted on Libsyn with either Getright or Nimiq. Yes, Juice is working and I suspect Itunes is working also. I also realize that the state of podcasting is such that the technology backbone it rests on is due to fail from time to time. But the goal of podcasting is to use RSS, Atom or whatever technology we can use to make the adoption of podcast production and consumption as simple and as ubiquitous as possible. To make it inclusive not exclusive and though the management of a business does involve decisions that make it more profitable hence less expensive to circulate the product, the goal should not be forgotten in this attempt to gain market share.

I have sent a support query to Libsyn and as of roughly 18 hours yet to receive more than an autoresponse back. Though I have had trouble with Slapcast in the past, it seems apparent to me that Libsyn’s popularity may have grown into being their worst enemy. For the return of my investment I am not getting what I feel is a good value. You are limited in far to many ways with Libsyn. And this last little hiccup may just be the straw that causes this camels back to break. It has been nice to have an alternate choice, and who knows. I maybe writing a similar post about Slapcast going out of business in the near future. But we can only deal with things on a daily basis. And though they have gotten my money for one more month I believe it maybe time to move on.

Update: As with most hypothesis, until all the facts become evident, truth is rather subjective. In an support email response Dave (One of the original founders) states:

Our system is still having some problems with partial content requests, which is more then likely causing the issues w/ these applications. A fix was put into place ealier this week that was supposed to address the issue, however there were some performance issues and it was pulled to be reworked.

And further he comments on the aquisition by Wizzard Software:

We (the founders) shall retain full control over Libsyn- one of the reasons we really like this deal. We will release more about the details of this deal soon. Trust that it’s not a sell-and-retire kind of arrangement. In so many ways, we are finally just getting started!

PCS Intel - Verizon’s New TV Ad Violates Terms of Service? Does this mean we get to buy a new phone/data card to use just as they show us, and then get terminated because of violation of terms of service they don’t seem to be able to uphold themselves when presenting the service to potential consumers? At the rate they are enforcing their TOS, what potential consumers are left.. Oh, thats right… There is a sucker born every minute. Even in the information age.

More on this at Techdirt.

Techdirt: Would Jesus Get Music From P2P Networks?
I think Jesus would support it(Sharing files). Think about all those fishermen he cheated by copying those fish! Thats 5000 lost sales.. or does it not count because they weren’t going to buy them anyway?

Seems a lot of equivocating going on about P2P. I found this response to be one of the most insightful comments posited on the subject. And the most humorous.

Wi-Fi Networking News Archives Ah, more Verizon related tomfoolery… ’nuff said.