Crete Carrier - A Year In Review - Fall 2013 Going Forward

When I got my first truck I bought the lifetime Sirius subscription for $500, unlimited data would have been good last year when I downloaded the last season of Breaking Bad, I mainly used truck stop wifi which took all night.
this casino is tight, I'll stick with the stock market .
There is another Cretin out there however, hope he has better luck

 

Just before they merged Sorry-ace screwed up my checking account by removing a years subscription (after I had cancelled it 3 months before) causing me to have 4 overdraft charges for small checks that bounced. They gave me the amount they took out but I was screwed out of $120 in overdraft charges on $140 worth of checks. The bank tried to back charge Sirrius...but we could never get them to pay the extra. From that point on, I vowed to never use their service again.

 

I use the iHeartradio app on my phone Monday thru Friday to listen to Rush Limbaugh and occasionally listen to my favorite teams' broadcast when Sirius/XM radio only has the opposition teams' broadcast utilizing a blue tooth speaker paired to my phone and my laptop that I bought when I was in one of those older Prostars without an auxiliary port. I know I can use an audio cable plugged into the radio for that purpose as well, but the blue tooth speaker is far easier and much more convenient. I also use it for the sound for my GPS navigation as well, which I do on one of my laptops that is sitting on a stand. Nonetheless, I listen to Sirius/XM and my Ipod the remainder of the time for music.

I also have a wifi capable blue ray DVD player, but I use it only for viewing DVDs. I'm currently watching the Duck Dynasty series, as I just bought the blue ray three season set the last time I went home and I also got the Swamp People collection as well, as I'm a Louisiana native. I do also like the Deadliest Catch episodes as well, so I will have to add that one to my list. And, of course, I'm always adding to my DVD movie collection all the time. Oh, I almost forgot, when I go home I also download all the LSU games off of youtube in HD to watch while I'm out on the road too.

In any event, with the exception of being at home, I never watched a Netflix movie while being out on the road exactly because of the bandwidth issue. But I do watch quite a few youtubes while out on the road and watching them have caused me to go over the limit a couple of times.

As for as mapping and navigation goes, I use Streets & Trips with the Truck Stops Plus add-on, which provides all the trucking specific POIs, together with google earth. Thus, I don't use any data for the mapping part, just on the google earth part.

I look up all my shippers and consignees in google earth first, zoom in and go to ground level to locate the driver entranceway, place a pushpin in the driver entrance way, then access the properties of that pushpin to get the GPS coordinates, that I then paste into Streets & Trips. That way Streets and Trips provides guidance directly into the driver entranceways.

Once those coordinates are pasted into Streets & Trips, I save those locations permanently in my personal template. Eventually, I will have the vast overwhelming majority of those shippers and consignees saved and planning a trip will only take a small fraction of the time it takes now. As a matter of fact, I have returned to many of them several times already.

As for as the routes go, I just synchronize the Crete route in Streets & Trips, which matches the route supplied by Crete thanks to the Truck Stops Plus add-on about 99 percent of the time anyway. Indeed, the beauty of Streets & Trips is the ease at which routes can be manipulated and then saved. I also use Streets & Trips together with the Truck Stops Plus add-on for a ton of other useful things besides trip planning and navigation as well.

 

Sorry to hear about your bad luck. That's why it's called gambling. Better luck next time! By the way, I'm at the Pilot in Troy, IL doing a 34 hour restart. I will deliver my load in Germantown, WI on Tuesday morning.

 

Thanks, I'm down around 27 gambling, about the same on drinks and this Buffett would blow up Joe's gullet.


As a former stockholder of Sirius, I sort of feel good about them over charging customers. It saved the company from bankruptcy and I can now listen to Howard and Jay

 

I found that my tablet fits perfectly in the hand grip on the drivers door of the Prostar. I put it in upside down when listening to ihear t radio and it amplifies the sound. Nice info on your setup there Olympian. Thanks

 

Speaking of Joe's gullett; I go to the doc for my 3 month check-up on Wednesday. I forgot my scales this time out but I'm hoping to weigh in the 2-teens somewhere 215, 216 "whatever it takes" <----(Mr. Mom reference)
Headed to Opelousas in the morning.

 

We'll, I made my delivery this morning in the snow and ice, I called a snow day after emptying. I have a load with an extra stop ending near Omaha. Then I head to Lincoln because they want to look at the Mobileye, or maybe because I've been ######## about the short loads.
Regardless, I'm talking to the big shots about this stupid 119,000 mile rule. It's totally stupid with the freight they want to run nowadays. I might be a local driver next week, as I'm a tad bit mouthy and don't have much respect for authority. I hope to get things changed, as I feel if Crete wants to run short loads like Heartland they need to get rid of that. Way too many drivers have been missing home time to get the miles in.

 

I've been here over 5 years and have gotten my raise every year. Usually around 124000 miles. The first year I stayed out more, but not so much the last three years. Miles aren't that hard to get as long as I'm lucky enough to stay out of the northeast as much as possible. That part of the country just makes it impossible to make miles.

 

Not me, I get way too many loads under 400 miles, and if I put in for home time when I'm near home they run me short loads to keep me in the area and I still end up getting home late. Last year I took around 35 days at home and barely squeaked by.
hey let's run a 400 mile load to a 380 mile load to a 300 mile load with an extra stop. They say short loads pay more so the driver should be happy.