Profile For Pianoman

The picture you mention was taken by Chris Burkhard, a photographer who inspires.

That particular picture was taken in Switzerland, I believe.

Chris’ images caught my attention before I went through the process of considering ‘Pure Joy’, as mentioned.
He later did this Ted Talk which struck a chord ...

“Every photograph is precious ... “
- Chris Burkhard

Pure Joy, Chris Burkhard - TedTalk

I have seen some of these places, or similar. He captures in a photo what I see and feel.

Wow, thanks for sharing that Ted talk! I really enjoyed his story.

Big Scott is right, it's very easy to remove the restriction later by just retesting in a manual at a cdl school. The hard part is finding someone who will let you practice on a manual. Some schools do like a one week refresher course--that's all it would take you to learn manual if you already know how to drive.

Just keep a spare key in your pants. You'll never lock yourself out...unless you forget your pants.

G town??

“It’s 9 o’clock on a Saturday,...the regular crowd shuffles in...”

Good to hear from you PM!

How are you? (Hijack of Donna’s post in progress)

Good to hear from you!

Haha nice one G! I'm great! Back on the road, teaming now, doing otr home furniture deliveries. Wife left me earlier this year. Should make six figures next year or close to it. That pretty much sums it up.

Sorry for the hijack Donna!

But seriously, you sure you're all right?

I'm surprised I didn't have more interaction like yours when I still worked for Swift. People are stupid.

Great question Old School! I usually engage it when moving as well so I'd love to know if I'm doing it wrong.

Grumpy Old Man asks:

I'll add another question to this, since it is related.

I remember locking differentials on farm tractors. When engaged, turning was almost impossible. Is it the same on today's trucks? Remember, I'm old, so hopefully technology has changed

Nope, doesn't make it hard to turn at all.

Hey Doug, I am also currently a local driver in Denver making about the same as you are, just without the overtime. I figured it up, and with overtime you're making around 60k a year right? You can definitely make at least that over the road and probably much more depending on where you go. I haven't looked much at other companies lately, but I know at mine (American Furniture Warehouse) our otr drivers bring in at least 70k a year and are home every week. I know firsthand because I used to drive otr for them and switched to local after several months.

American Furniture Warehouse also increased their pay for otr drivers and local drivers a few months ago.

Maybe he can see if his company can send someone out with him for a day or two to coach him on it. If not, perhaps watching a bunch of YouTube videos might help?

Of course, he could always contact a local trucking school to do a couple days of training with them, but that will be more expensive and he probably will have to share a truck with other students.

This sh** is being "stress tested" by the consumers of the technology. Living Crash-Test Dummies...

Madness!

It is indeed madness--it's the number one reason this is so infuriating.

Just saw this in the news:

Software bug led to death in Uber’s self-driving crash

Unfortunately the dog ain't mine

Padlock

I have diabetes and would have to get my insulin sometimes while I was still halfway across the country from home. I've always had my prescriptions filled at Walgreens, so I'd just call a Walgreens in whatever area I was going to be in and had them transfer the prescription from my Walgreens at home. If I was in an area that didn't have any Walgreens locations but there were CVS pharmacies instead, I'd call the CVS I was close to and have them transfer the prescription from my home Walgreens.

It was always really easy and convenient to get my medication on the road. I'd usually just find a Walgreens or CVS that was really close to a truck stop. That way I could drop my trailer, bobtail over to the store to get my medication, then go right back to the truckstop and hook back up all in less than 30 minutes. Of course, like Susan said, Walmart is another alternative and way easier to get to for trucks.

Way to go man! You're awesome! Nice shower selfie btw haha--is that a Love's?

When going through a city with three plus lanes on the interstate, I tend to stay out of the right lane most of the time unless there is a law that trucks can't use the left lane. I find I tend to function as a rolling road block to merging traffic when I hold the right lane through cities. But in cities with only three lanes on the interstate there's always that issue of faster trucks running up on me in the middle lane, even though my truck is fast enough to run the speed limit. Alot of times I'll just temporarily move to the right if a faster truck comes up behind me. But if there's someone right in front of me or the right lane is too busy, I'll just hold my ground and the trucker behind me can just exercise some patience or pass me on the left. I try as much as possible not to be a nuisance but sometimes there is no perfect solution.

Congrats Forrest! Really exciting news! I'm happy to hear your perseverance paid off.

Nice going Devan. The tests for the endorsements are super easy if you use the High Road to study. The hardest one is the HazMat, and even that one isn't bad at all.

I embedded the video in Pianoman's comment above if you haven't seen it already.

Thanks Brett.

The human eye wouldn't have seen it the way that camera did. We would have seen her long before the camera shows she was visible.

Absolutely! It might have helped if the human driver hadn't been texting for the 6 seconds right before the impact.

These cars are designed to see objects in front of them and this car never detected her at all.

This is the part that's a really big deal to me. If Lidar can "see" fine in the dark, that means that this car would have behaved the same way in broad daylight as well. That's a huge huge problem. If I were that lady's friend or relative I'd be suing Uber for every penny they have. I guess I've chosen my side lol.

I've been keeping up with this story, and as it turns out, the police have been kind enough to share Uber's video of the incident with the public.

I don't know about you guys, but I'm very disappointed by what I see. This accident could have been prevented and this woman's life spared. Yes, technically the woman was jaywalking and she may or may not have been legally to blame, but I don't just run over pedestrians or other vehicles when they break the law. I legally could have rammed into the suv who cut me off with about 20 feet to spare in traffic yesterday, but I didn't because I anticipated it and reacted to prevent an accident. The pedestrian was in the road long before the vehicle approached, and the vehicle should have had no problem seeing it since lidar and radar work fine in the dark. Not only that, but the car never even slowed down or tried to avoid the acccident in any way whatsoever.

Here's an article which pretty much sums up how I feel about this. It is mostly well written except for the part where the author tries to play statistics analyst when he obviously has no understanding of statistics. Enjoy:

Video suggests huge problems with Uber’s driverless car program