Apr. 12th, 2009

johnridley: (Bookworm)
World War I, the Great War (TTC, Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius)

I should say that I'm really pretty bad with history, I don't think I paid any attention to it in school, but I now find it interesting and I'm trying to catch up.

Absolutely excellent coverage of this war. I think it's a shame that WWI is so overlooked these days, but that's understandable given the wealth of information and combatants from WWII that were around when documentary making took off. Also I think that though the US was involved and their support was crucial, it was much less of America's war than WWII was, so I'm sure that has something to do with the lack of coverage.

WWI is essential knowledge to understand the entire world of the 20th century, and particularly war and combat. It was really when industrialized death came about, and saw the first significant use of a lot of technologies of war - poison gas, machine guns, trench warfare, air war, submarines, etc. It's possibly also the ugliest and most horrific war that's ever been fought, as all these wonderful new killing technologies were available but nobody knew what to do with or about them.

As an aside, I also learned something about those ancestors from Alsace-Lorraine alternated between being born in "France" and then "Germany" and then "France" again through the 19th and 20th centuries.

36 x 30 minute lectures.

Car brakes

Apr. 12th, 2009 07:29 pm
johnridley: (Default)
Full replacement of rear brake pads and rotors on the 97 Taurus today. Took about 45 minutes total once I had all the parts. Yesterday we flushed the system full of fresh fluid (first time ever)

Interestingly enough, I bought the parts at Murrays, came home, and had TOTALLY the wrong rotors. I had 4 lug vented rotors instead of the 5 lug solids that I needed. I went back and they looked it up again, and said "That's really weird, that IS the right part number." They went in the back and got two more boxes, we opened them up and those boxes had the right part in them. It looks like there happened to be two boxes mis-packed and I happened to get them. They were still factory taped.

The salesman exchanged them and gave me 15% off for the mistake (8 bucks).

I think the pads had been changed back at about 60K, but the rotors were original (and looking bad, mainly due to rust).

Odometer: 128850

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