Hacking American Idol

My wife is a big fan of American Idol. She watches it every week, whether live or off of our DVR. Each week now she gets to vote for the contestants after the show. Last week she sat there redialing the voting number on her cell phone over and over. I think she got in maybe 10 votes before giving up.

This week, as the show was getting over, she mentioned that now she needed to go vote. Being the geek that I am, I asked her if she wanted me to make it 10x easier and help her get in tons more votes. She had no clue that was possible.

I proceeded to then install a redialing program on our laptop computer. Since it has a modem, I just hooked up the laptop to a phone line and set the redialer to call the voting line over and over. It calls in and when it hears a ring, waits 5 seconds (enough time for the vote to be picked up and counted) and then hangs up and redials again. We let that run last night for the two hours voting was open. We got in 504 votes. Not bad for one person. And since it's a toll free number we didn't have to worry about long distance charges.

If anyone else is interested in using the same software, here's a link to where I got it.