Mon, 13 Jul 2009

Accounting
Scenario: we're sitting down at home to eat dinner and the landline rings. [Yes, I still have a home landline. But only because the mobile signal in my corner of the footprint is particularly unreliable.] Someone gets up to look at the caller ID and says 'toll free', so we ignore it and go back to our meal. That seems like it happens all the time, but until recently, I had no way to quantify the experience.

It has long bothered me that the landline provider (QWEST) only gives detailed accounting for outgoing long distance calls, whereas my wireless provider (VZW) gives me a detailed accounting of all incoming and outgoing calls. I'd like to have easy access to a summary of how many calls from 'toll free' and 'unknown caller' I receive every month.

An optimally geeky fix would be to install an asterisk pbx system at home and route all landline calls through that for logging purposes. I might get around to doing that sometime before the landline finally gets unplugged. Or I could grab any of the freely available caller ID utilities from the web. But for now, I'm satisfying the need via reinvention. I keep a modem on the line and log the caller id info it spits out. The modem is in a decrepit laptop that is only partially functional since a bike mishap a few years ago which left both me and the computer banged up. (I recovered, but the laptop still looks like an elephant stepped on it.) I cobbled a script together to configure the modem and log its output to a file. The script works but is Most Ugly. In the interest of academics, I'll probably clean it up a bit and post it somewhere. I also expect to extend the functionality. (e.g., I'll slurp the caller id info into a real database instead of a simple flat file, and I'll add options for sending notifications on specific events).

Haven't yet collected enough data to better characterize the amount of those annoyance calls.

posted at: 12:16 | path: | permanent link to this entry

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