Trucker Tom's Blog

Welcome to my HwyBlogs.Com Blog. I learned to drive a truck way back when I was 18 years old, and with a few breaks here and there have been driving for a living ever since. I just turned 50.

Computers and technology have long been a big hobby of mine, and I even tried working a couple of years as a network administrator. I've found that nothing compares to the freedom and lack of office/workplace politics that over-the-road trucking offers.

My main website, http://www.truckerphoto.com has everything from reviews of tech gadgets, restaurant reviews, photos I've taken on the road, my political rants, and a lot more.

I've also been doing an audio podcast since mid-December of 2003 available at http://truckerphoto.blogspot.com.

In my audio MP3 podcast, I've got a regular segment called "How to become a trucker" that many of you should find interesting. In those segments I go into many things that people who are thinking about becoming over-the-road truck drivers are curious about. For the sake of convenience, I've split just those segments off and they are available at http://www.truckflix.com in the "podcast" section in the middle of the home page about mid-way down.

"What the heck is a podcast?" you ask. An audio podcast is simply a spoken-word MP3 audio recording that's posted on a server, done in the style of a radio program. You can either listen to the program by clicking directly on the file on your computer, or you can automatically download it to your computer's hard drive or portable MP3 player whenever I post a new show right here from my truck, right from wherever my truck happens to be currently located. A great Windows-based podcast catching client is called Doppler Radio and can be downloaded for free from http://www.dopplerradio.net.

Think of a podcast in terms of a paper magazine subscription. You subscribe to a magazine. Once you have subscribed to a magazine, the publisher automatically mails you a current copy whenever a new issue becomes available. The postman brings the magazine and deposits it in your mailbox. You retrieve the magazine from your mailbox and consume the magazine's content at your leisure.

A podcast works exactly the same way. You subscribe to the podcast feed with a free program installed on your computer like Doppler Radio. When I post a new podcast program, your computer finds the file and automatically downloads it to your hard drive or portable MP3 player. You then find the file and consume it at your leisure by either listening to it directly on your computer, or on your portable MP3 player. I personally listen to podcasts while I'm driving my truck by plugging a cassette adapter into my portable MP3 player and listen to them directly over the truck's stereo tape player.

So, if you are curious about my "How to become a Trucker" segments, go to http://www.truckflix.com and check them out.

If you have any questions, please email them directly to me at [url]tom@truckerphoto.com[/url]. I look forward to hearing from you.--TOM

Category: General