• 2 Posts
  • 48 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 18th, 2023

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  • About 6 years ago I somehow (Safety, Maintenance, and Engineering departments never figured out how) managed to get stuck in a robot cage with 4 water jet cutting robots. I have never been more terrified in my life.

    One of my coworkers said he had never seen anyone move as fast as when I yanked the safety rip line to kill the machine. Didn’t get hurt, thank god, but found out that adrenaline makes me giddy. Every thing was flipping hilarious for a few hours after they got me out of the cage.





  • I really wish that were entirely the case. The distances I quoted came from safety trainings I’ve had to take over the years. Given my personal experiences during that time, I think they were from before ABS was mandated. And I had a lot of ABS failures when I was OTR and few close calls as a result of those failures. That’s one of the reasons I chose to switch to running a yard truck 5 years ago. Far less stress.

    When ABS failed on dry pavement and I needed to stop in a hurry, the affected tandem would tend to lock up and bounce along the ground. Nerve racking and scary when there’s traffic in front of you, but not near as bad as on wet or icy roads. The sheer terror of feeling one of my axles start sliding under me.

    If I had one word of advice for drivers new to the industry, it would be to drive as if none of the safety systems on the truck and trailer exist because in my experience they will fail exactly when you need them.

    But when they do work they are f-ing magical.



  • Some probably do, tech has advanced quite a bit since I started driving in 2008, but the newer tech tends not to be installed widely when it first comes out due to how unreliable tech becomes under the working conditions that are normal in the trucking industry. Fleet owners want their equipment on the road making money, not in the shop costing money, so they tend to wait till a tech proves itself to be reliable. Plus upgrades costs money, so they tend not to happen till a unit is replaced with a newer model, which can take a while.

    Most large companies in the US have an experimental fleet where they try out new tech first, before they roll it out to the rest of their fleets. They are looking for cost effectiveness, reliability and driver response. The smaller owner operators, which make up the bulk of the trucking industry, tend to follow (slowly) after them. And as old as the trucks are, the trailers are often even older. While most trailers in my company’s fleet are less than 3 years old right now, the oldest trailer (now mostly used for hauling pallets back to Chep) was built in 1992 according to it’s data plate. If it’s ABS system is newer then 2008, when it was last active in the fleet I’m a monkey’s uncle, and I’d pay long odds it’s still the original system from 92.


  • Most of a tractor-trailer’s stopping power is split between the trailer brakes and the tractor’s drive tandems. If there is not enough weight on those axles, the tires can’t grip the pavement properly. If I apply too much power to the brakes the wheels can start bouncing or just lock up and start skidding if the ABS system is acting up.

    Most tractor-trailers you see on the road in the US are designed to weigh 60,000 to 80,000 lbs (~ 27,000 - 36,000 kg). For comparison, a Honda Civic weighs roughly 3,000 lbs (1360 kg). Every system on the truck is designed around moving that amount of mass safely. With an empty dry van trailer your looking at closer to 30,000 lbs (~ 13,000 kg). Makes a difference in performance. Ride is rougher, takes longer to stop.


  • I’m a truck driver.

    • You are far safer behind me than in front of me. It can take me over two US football fields (200 yards or roughly 180 meters) to come to a full stop and it takes more distance if my trailer is empty. The average car can stop in half that distance. Most cars turn into tin cans when hit by a rig at 25 mph.
    • If you see a number of trucks all moving into the same lane, might consider getting in the same lane, behind us. Odds are pretty good we either saw something in the lane ahead or we heard about something over the CB.
    • I can see you playing on your phone while driving. Cops in some states have been known to hitch rides with truck drivers in order to catch distracted drivers.
    • Learn zipper merging!

  • First OS was DOS (I think) on an Apple IIE at school. I think there were a few Commodore 64’s there as well. A couple years later we got our first home computer running Windows 95. Good times playing Doom, Jane’s Apache, an MS Flight Simulator.

    My first personal computer was running Windows XP and I switched to Ubuntu sometime in 2004. Ran Ubuntu for the most part till a few months ago when I switched my desktop and laptop to NixOS.

    Started self hosting services in 2012 and started with Ubuntu as base OS. Now though most of my servers are Proxmox with the VMs usually running Ubuntu LTS, though NixOS is starting to creep in there as well.



  • Hard drives can fail. A strong magnetic field could scramble the data on the platters. HDD’s are pretty reliable usually though. Biggest concern with external HDDs would be fall damage.

    I would say to check random files from time to time and you should be fine. Every 2 or 3 years, replace your backup drive. A backup program like Borg could help detect if you have a problem with your files, but you lose a bit of the simplicity of your current rsync method.

    Anything your truly worried about should follow the 3,2,1 standard. Minimum 3 copies, on 2 separate media types, with 1 copy offsite. That said your current setup is already better than 95% of the general population and probably 70% of the Fedi.








  • In the US, more often than not, intersections like this were designed to handle traffic consisting of tractor-trailers. Tractor-trailers need considerably more space to maneuver than a small passenger car or pickup truck.

    As for the visual obstructions, my guess is some city planner failed to take the sight line of small cars into account when decorating or road side maintenance had been put off, allowing foliage to grow where it shouldn’t.

    What you’re supposed to do is fully stop at the line and then slowly scoot forward to where you can see crossing traffic and come to a full stop again. Then proceed according to whatever traffic rule governs that intersection.