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Stay away from Belkin?

If you’ve owned a computer for any length of time, you’ve probably heard of Belkin, a company that makes peripherials and accessories like USB hubs, KVMs, cables, and wireless networking devices. Due to the company’s ruthless marketing, Belkin accessories are sometimes be the only brand available at many big-box stores like Best Buy and Circuit City. Like Monster Cable, Belkin products always felt like robust and quality products (which is no doubt why the company was able to get in the door of corporate giants like Best Buy). But us geeks never really warmed to them. It always seemed as if something was wrong with their products, as if they didn’t quite work as advertised.

Well, we now know why. Sort of. Last week, news hit the Internet that the company was paying people to post good reviews of their products at sites like Amazon.com and Newegg.com. That in itself is bad, but it’s hardly the crime of the century. That is, until people alleging to be current and former Belkin employees opened the floodgates with tales about the company’s sordid business practices.

The allegations include:

– Not just paying for positive Belkin reviews, but also paying for negative reviews of competitor’s products.

– Sending hardware with custom firmware (operating systems) to reviewers, in order to hide bugs in their production hardware.

– Putting Microsoft and Apple hardware certification logos on products that had not earned them.

– Releasing “blatantly inaccurate” test results to make their products look better against the competition.

– Giving bonuses to business units with the most positive reviews per quarter, regardless of the rate of return of the product (the theory here being that even if a product sucks, the number of consumers that actually return a $25 product would be vanishingly small).

– Rigging demos hardware at trade shows. While I’m sure Belkin isn’t the only company to do this, the example given – running cables underneath (or behind) furniture so that a “wireless” media server is actually “wired” – is pretty damn awful.

You can read the whole sad tale here. In the meantime, I suggest you stay away from Belkin products until all this shakes out!

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SONGS I LOVE: “Just Like Heaven”

The Watson TwinsDid you, by any chance, happen to catch this week’s episode of Fringe on Fox? Because if you did, you would have heard The Watson Twins’ cover of The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven”.

The Watson Twins – comprised of identical twins Chandra and Leigh Watson, along with Aram Arslanian, Russ Pollard, Jason Soda, and Jenny Lewis – are a band based out of Los Angeles, California.

Born and reared in Louisville, Kentucky, Chandra and Leigh attended the University of Evansville before moving to Silverlake, California in 1997. There, they formed a band called Slydell. A few years later, they formed The Watson Twins.

What can I say about this song… other than it’s awesome? Imagine a slightly more folksy version of Mazzy Star covering The Cure and you’ve got this song down pat. I was watching Fringe on my computer, then saw the scene with this song in the background. I immediately paused the video player and looked online for this song… and after I’d downloaded it, I listened to it over and over and over again. It’s just so… hypnotic!

Tell me what you think:

[audio:watson_twins.mp3]

Check out their MySpace page here and their Wikipedia page here.

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A Modest Proposal

Perhaps the biggest sin in American sports fandom is bandwagoning – the act of becoming a fan of a team when they’re playing well, but then ceasing to be a fan once they’ve cooled off.

We all know bandwagoners… like your hypothetical friends “Dave and Cindy”. Dave and Cindy don’t especially care about the NFL. They’ve never owned a piece of NFL apparel in their lives, nor had they ever even considered buying any. They express no desire to watch regular-season games with you, and might even be hostile to the idea of watching a game in the first place. But then your local sports team makes it to the playoffs and suddenly Dave and Cindy want to come over to your house to watch the game. They’re wearing matching team sweatshirts, have officially licensed pom poms in team colors and even have a pair of team flags on their car. Dave sits on the sofa and tries to converse with you using things he’s cribbed from the sports section of your local paper. Cindy sits with your missus and cheers at the appropriate times. Unfortunately, as soon as the playoffs are over, Dave and Cindy completely forget all about your team… until the next time they go to the playoffs, in which case Dave and Cindy will be back wearing their sweatshirts and waving their pom poms.

Over the years, several unwritten rules have been developed in the “Man Code” to prevent bandwagoning. The biggest rules are thus:

If you are born in a city with an professional sports franchise, you must be a fan of that team if you’re going to be a fan at all. If you move to a city that has a team in the same sport, you are allowed a five-year “grace period”, in which you may root for your original home team, before you are required to become a fan of your “new” team. If you move to a city without a team in that sport, you are allowed to continue cheering for your original home team; if a team is created after you move, you are allowed to keep cheering for your original home team. If your home team moves, you are absolved of any allegiance to them, and can root for any other team you choose.

It’s silly, isn’t it? The problem with bandwagoning is, as I see it, not with the first part of the definition (“becoming a fan of a team when they’re playing well”), but the second (“ceasing to be a fan once they’ve cooled off”). After all, every sport needs new fans, and if a team on the other side of the country makes you an NFL fan, well… fine by me.

Continue reading “A Modest Proposal”

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Girls and Football

I just had to post this! Nextround.net has this awesome list of things “your girlfriend” said during the NFC\AFC Championships.

Here are a few of my favorites:

“I thought the Cardinals were in St. Louis. Is St. Louis in Arizona?”

“I thought you said Matt Leinart was on one of these teams.”

“You really don’t see that many black guys named Larry.”

“Which guy did you say would draw me a picture of Jesus?”

“THAT’s who Kendra is going to marry? He can’t even catch.”

“What did you mean when you said you thought it would be a Pennsylvania Super Bowl? None of these teams are called Pennsylvania.”

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STEELERS WIN!

The Pittsburgh Steelers knocked off the Baltimore Ratbirds last night 23-14 to win the AFC Championship! My team is now off to Tampa, where they’ll face the Arizona Cardinals in Super Bowl XLIII!!!

AFC Championship FootballHere we go Steelers, here we go!!!!!

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TV News

Two quick items from the world of TV:

– Yes! Matthew Weiner, the show runner for Mad Men, signed a seven-figure deal with Lionsgate to create (at least) two more seasons of Mad Men, as well as another show and a movie! Hurrah! Read more about it here.

– ABC hasn’t forgotten Pushing Daisies. The Alphabet Net says that it will run the final episodes of Daisies, Dirty Sexy Money and Eli Stone this summer. I’ll believe it when I see it, but it’s good news for those of us missing the last three episodes of Daisies.

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Random News Dump

– Krispy Kreme is giving away free doughnuts on Inauguration Day! So if you’re near a KK store next Tuesday, be sure to stop in a get your free doughnut!

– 79 year-old Donald Peters bought a couple of lottery tickets on the morning of November 1, 2008. He died of a heart attack later that day. His wife, in mourning for her husband, put off checking the tickets. In fact, she was almost going to throw them away. But she checked the numbers anyway… and found out that he had won $10 million!

– Here’s a scam that you won’t believe: a couple of guys walked in to Hattiesburg Cycles in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and gathered up $8000 worth of merchandise. Then then presented the cashier with a credit card. The card was declined. They then claimed that they “expected that to happen”, so they somehow convinced the cashier to call an 800 number, where a voice on the phone gave the cashier an “authorization number” and told her to authorize the charge. You know where this is going, right? The card was either stolen or fake, and the person at the 800 number was working with the crooks. How they managed to convince the cashier to call their 800 number and not the one on the credit card machine is a mystery.

– A recent Pew study found that, for the first time, more Americans get their news from the Internet than from newspapers.