Flowroute has served Lime Daley for the last 15 years and they have done well for the most part, but every once in a while they make really bad policy decisions.  Last time they almost made me switch to a new provider was a silly decision to charge all customers a monthly fee for 911 access even if they couldn't actually call 911 due it being an incoming-only line or not even registered.  They insisted that they couldn't change that policy, so I cancelled a bunch of numbers that I had been holding onto because they had a good area and region code.  A month after I did that, they must have gotten yelled by lots of customers, because they reversed their position.

Last week, they made another change, disabling all outgoing SMS messages for all non-commercial customers, stating that all of their DIDs are commercial.  And since many of my customers are not commercial, they can't register for the 10DLC system that Flowroute is subjecting all of their customers to (including the increased fees).  So, I'm now in the market for a new SIP provider.

Until I can switch, all outgoing SMS messages won't be able to be sent.  I'm sort of hopeful that Flowroute might change their mind because it will be a lot of work to switch, and I've mostly been happy with their service (though we do have occasional issues in Hillsboro, NH when they switchover to cheaper routes, so hopefully that will go away with a new provider.  I'll be interviewing providers over the coming week or so. 

I was faced with an interesting problem yesterday of trying to calculate the optimal salary for someone who wants to contribute all of their income to their 401K.  And "optimal" is defined as "near as possible to the deductible maximum and not have any half penny or rounding issues per month or for the quarterly social security and medicare reports".  In previous years (especially last year) it was trivial to get the right number, and I didn't have to think too much.  I poked around guessing some numbers but kept getting fractional payments when multiplying the tax rates, so ended up writing a script to do it, and got an excuse to do it in Python, since I've been trying to learn it, but often don't have reasons to use it. (not that this script is all that interesting from a Python perspective).  As my first Java instructor said, "it looks like you took a C program and then renamed it .java and modified it until the compiler didn't complain."  And I had to admit that he was right...

#!/bin/python3
MAX_401K=23000
SOCIAL_SECURITY_RATE=0.062
MEDICARE_RATE=0.0145
TEST_RANGE=200
MONTHLY_NET=int(MAX_401K/12)
MONTHLY_GROSS = int(MONTHLY_NET / (1 - SOCIAL_SECURITY_RATE - MEDICARE_RATE))

for gross in range(MONTHLY_GROSS,MONTHLY_GROSS-TEST_RANGE, -1):
  social=gross*SOCIAL_SECURITY_RATE
  if(social*100 == int(social*100)):
    medicare=gross*MEDICARE_RATE
    if(medicare*100 == int(medicare*100)):
      net=gross-medicare-social
      print("gross:",gross,"net:",net," social:",social,"  medicare:",medicare)
      break

Hope this helps someone else, and maybe I'll even remember I wrote this next year and not calculate it manually...