{"id":254,"date":"2005-04-13T08:33:46","date_gmt":"2005-04-13T16:33:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/2005\/04\/12\/how-i-killed-my-answering-machine-part-iii\/"},"modified":"2005-04-13T08:34:02","modified_gmt":"2005-04-13T16:34:02","slug":"how-i-killed-my-answering-machine-part-iii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/2005\/04\/13\/how-i-killed-my-answering-machine-part-iii\/","title":{"rendered":"How I Killed My Answering Machine: Part III"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the third of seven parts of the story of how I killed my answering machine. How complicated can it be to replace a simple little device with something a little more geeky? About 17 months, $500 and countless hours – that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how complicated.<\/em><\/p>\n

Part III: Lingo<\/strong><\/p>\n

Plan D: Lingo<\/p>\n

I lived with my unsatisfying answering machine though until December when I signed up for the Lingo VOIP service<\/a>. We barely use our landline anyway (if it were up to me I’d drop it altogether), so this was cheaper than what we get from SBC ($14.95 a month for 500 minutes). Plus it included free long distance. And it had this little feature where it can email voicemail to you. I unplugged my answering machine PC.<\/p>\n

The setup kit arrived in mid-December. The installation for the VOIP modem says you can install it behind your router, but I couldn’t get that to work. When I put it in front of my router, it messed all kinds of things up, even though that configuration prioritizes voice traffic. There’s a web interface to the router that I played with to try to get it working, but didn’t have any luck. Sometimes I couldn’t get to it at all. I also discovered it had a telnet interface where you could change many of the same settings. After messing around in there, I managed to get it in a state where it wasn’t pingable anymore. Oops. I ran out of time before Christmas vacation to get it working right, so I just left it.<\/p>\n

Of course while we were on Christmas vacation, Lingo finished transferring my number over and my local phone service was cancelled. The Lingo voicemail was working though and we’re getting messages via email which is fine while we’re not home. <\/p>\n

When we returned in January, I set out to get it working. There are absolutely no buttons on the thing and no obvious way to reset the thing to factory defaults. Figuring all was lost, I called Lingo support. The Indian guy that answered walked me through the braindead troubleshooting rituals – turn everything off, and turn it back on. That didn’t work? How about turning everything on and off again? Finally he gave up and set he would escalate to level 2 support; they would call me back sometime. <\/p>\n

The next day I finally got back into the router by plugging the ethernet port directly into my laptop and accidentally pinging the broadcast address which reminded me what random IP address I had assigned to it. I then got it working again by putting it in front of my router, but then I remembered why I didn’t like that last time – all kinds of networking stuff got messed up. Lingo kinda assumes that you have one computer connected directed to a cable modem or DSL line. I’ve got something like 5 behind a router. <\/p>\n

Moving it back behind the router just wouldn’t work. I tried messing with the router (an SMC7004VBR<\/a>) settings, but it wouldn’t go. I did some research on some messageboards and people mentioned which routers worked well for them. Lots of people also seemed to have a poor opinion of SMC routers. <\/p>\n

I decided it was time to upgrade to 802.11g anyway and headed to Fry’s on Jan. 3 after checking the prices for the router I wanted, the Linksys WRT54G<\/a>. This one seemed to be pretty popular and what’s better is that it has a unique (for consumer routers) QoS feature which would allow me to prioritize voice traffic over data so calls wouldn’t get dropped if I’m downloading a file or something at the same time. And it wouldn’t require me to put the Lingo modem in front of it.<\/p>\n

For once, I had a mostly positive Fry’s experience. At first I couldn’t find the router. The shelf they should have been on was empty. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned about Fry’s is that they put the same item in at least two different places. Sure enough I eventually stumbled upon a Linksys kiosk with the router I wanted. Amazingly it was the same price as Amazon ($50) with the same rebate! I happily paid the extra sales tax as my fee for “having it right now.” <\/p>\n

When I got home, I quickly realized that my old router sucked. This new one was slick. It started up very quickly, unlike my old one that took at least a minute to get going. The web interface had lots of cool options. The box had all kinds of stickers and warnings to run the setup CD first to configure it. I tried that, but it couldn’t find the router. I gave up and just plugged it in. It worked right away. Even better, Lingo worked perfectly when plugged into it. Amazing! It was fast too. It is a bit ugly, but I can live with that. I spent some time configuring it the way I liked, spat on my old router, and went to bed.<\/p>\n

The next day I finished the phone setup, plugging the wall’s phone outline into the Lingo and all the phones in the house lit up. Cool! (Of course I did this without reading the warnings that if you did this and there was still power coming through the phone line from the phone company, it would fry your VOIP modem. Good thing it didn’t.)<\/p>\n

There was only one problem left – the TiVo. <\/p>\n

Next, Part IV: Modem Misery<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the third of seven parts of the story of how I killed my answering machine. How complicated can it be to replace a simple little device with something a little more geeky? About 17 months, $500 and countless hours – that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how complicated. Part III: Lingo Plan D: Lingo I lived with my …<\/p>\n

Continue reading ‘How I Killed My Answering Machine: Part III’ »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}