I’ve dealt with Tire Discounters before when buying new tires, but the last time I called and talked to Joe. He gave me a good deal on some tires for Samantha’s van. Normally when I go to a place like that I always leave feeling like I just got screwed over. Not in this case. That was last year.

This weekend, I attempted to replace my brake pads due to some light squealing I’ve been hearing lately. I’ve had the pads for a few weeks and finally had time this weekend to do it. I got my wheel off and began getting frustrated with my inability to break two of the bolts free that had to come off. The temperature outside felt like 200 degrees and finally I gave up and put it back together.

I called Tire Discounters, because I bought a set of tires there last year and figured I was due for a rotation anyway. He told me if I use my own parts it would be $90 including turning the rotors if needed. After I hung up I could already hear him telling me I would need new rotors and get taken for $300 dollars.

After I went in and they went through my brakes they told me that there was nothing wrong with my pads and that “if we changed them it would be a waste of money, and that’s not what we do here”. The squeak was from some rust on my rotors and was OK. He gave me a quote for some new rotors.

They rotated the tires and I left, without spending anything. Two thumbs up for the Tire Discounters on Princeton Road in Fairfield Township.

For years I have been using Mozilla Firefox as my web browser of choice, and after seeing Google Chrome mentioned here and there I figured I’d give it a try. Most of what Google comes out with is pretty good. After two weeks of using it, here’s what I’ve determined:

What’s Hot:
1. By not having a toolbar or anything else at the top it makes your screen appear cleaner and larger.

2. The two menu options makes it easy to figure out where you need to go to make adjustments.

3. Adding a new tab will display thumbnail of the website you visit most often. Clicking one of the thumbnails takes you right there. It would be nice for Google to incorporate other items in here such as GMails, RSS feeds and other items.

What’s Not:
1. The biggest problem that I see with this is you cannot lock the tabs in place. If I have a lot of applications running I might accidentally drag a tab to create a new window. This really bothers me.

2. As a webmaster, viewing the pagerank of a page is important to me. You would think that a web browser made by Google would have the PR indicator, it doesn’t. I’ve had to add a third part shortcut and place in my bookmarks to see what the pagerank is.

3. You cannot add plugins to this browser.

My overall feeling about Google Chrome is that I like it and I guess I’ll stick with it for a while.

Andrew go a hit his first baseball game this year, then has been completely hitless since. He finally made contact this weekend and we were lucky enough to have the camera running.