What's New On These Pages: January 2003

Next month: February 2003

• Wednesday 29th January
  The chat room was fairly quiet tonight (maybe everyone was watching the Liverpool-Arsenal 2-2 draw on Sky Sports ?) and there were no problems in the chat room, even if it is difficult to make out some numbers when the audience is screaming/clapping, there's background music and Dedicoat speaking fairly quietly tonight :-) The full results came through on the official site about an hour after the draw and only just ahead of BBC teletext.

• Saturday 25th January
  There was a surprising influx of visitors during the TV show (and, yes, before the main draw took place for a change) and there must have been a good dozen or so present. No problems with the draws or the TV show commentary and the official site put up the full results about 70 minutes after the draws (and BBC teletext put the figures up at about the same time).

• Wednesday 22nd January
  It was moderately busy come draw time in the chat room tonight and there were no problems transcribing the draw in there for the above average number of visitors. The official site was a bit slow to publish the full results (about an hour after the draws) and may have been beaten by teletext (I didn't cross check this evening).

• Saturday 18th January
  No problems in the chat room tonight for the usual live show commentary and draw, although Camelot's Web site became "particularly" inacessible (i.e. no page would load at all for 45+ minutes, as opposed to the usual 3 minutes per page shortly after a draw).

  Hence, I got initial info from BBC teletext about 75 minutes after the draws and this was backed up by the Camelot phone line (who I complained to - yet again - about the particularly bad performance of their Web site this evening w.r.t. page loading).

• Thursday 16th January
  As I suspected, Camelot corrected both their phone line and official Web site for the unwon lottery jackpot amount from last night (to the amount I said it should be).

• Wednesday 15th January
  There was a slight lottery show running time confusion between my TV mag (5 minutes) and pretty well everything else (10 minutes), but it didn't matter much because the show started two minutes late anyway. The chat room was only moderately busy and despite being billed as 10 minutes long, the BBC continue to refuse to air the Extra draw live on their Wednesday show.

  Unusually, BBC teletext easily beat the official Web site to the full results, but it appears someone with a typing disorder managed to not only get the number of 3+Thunderball winners wrong (it's 3,092 and not the 3,091 that teletext claimed), but also spectacularly messed up the number of Pick 2 winners in HotPicks, stating the bizarre figure of "8,50?" winners instead of "8,050" winners.

  If that wasn't bad enough, Camelot got in on the act too by stating that the unwon Extra jackpot tonight was exactly £3,200,000. This smells of either an estimated figure or a round down to the nearest £100,000. Both the phone line and the official Web site stuck to their guns as of 11.00pm, so I'll phone them up on Thursday to see if they've changed their minds on this (it should be £3,289,253 in case you're curious).

• Saturday 11th January
  It was a fairly typical Saturday - Liverpool failed to win for their 11th consecutive league game, the usual suspects turned up in the chat room, Eamonn Holmes was his standard slimy self and the official site was both the world's slowest Web site page loading-wise and the quickest with the full results (which turned up about 50 minutes after the draws, but took almost 15 minutes to load [I'm not kidding]).

• Wednesday 8th January
  Tonight's lottery TV show was scheduled to air at 8.55pm GMT on BBC 1. Well, apparently, the BBC took it upon itself to air the show not one minute early, not two minutes early, but a full three minutes early, which is nothing short of astounding. It meant that when I turned my TV on at 8.53pm GMT ready to watch the pre-show promo clips and the start of the show, imagine my horror when the Thunderball draw had already begun !

  Naturally, it was a major scramble to get all the details entered without any mistakes - I ended up having to just type the numbers into a terminal window and transcribe them later because of the sheer panic. Luckily, I didn't mess up any of the info and it was relief to get all the pages generated and then sit back and wait for the full results, which duly turned up about 45 minutes later on the official Web site (ahead of BBC teletext, which is the usual case nowadays).

• Saturday 4th January
  The lottery show started late (thanks to Southampton hammering Spurs 4-0 just beforehand live on BBC 1), but there were no problems with the live commentary and draw in the chat room. The official lottery site was running its usual dog-slow self for a couple of hours after the draw (it's amazing they've done nothing to fix this since the "revamp" last year), but I just about managed to load a page with the main Lotto results at about the same time that BBC teletext updated their info. Of course, by then I was already on the phone to Camelot and they had the full results too (all of this was about an hour after the draws completed).

• Thursday 2nd January
  Bought two more tickets for Saturday's rollover draw and noticed that the main draw playslip has abandoned the dark panel backgrounds on half its game panels and has sensibly switched to a white background for those now.

• Wednesday 1st January
  The usual suspects turned up for the New Year's Day draw and I'm sure that the Voice of the Balls (not Dedicoat for a change) read out the Extra balls in somewhat unsorted order ! This confused me whilst doing the live draw in the chat room, but I eventually got it "sorted" out.

  The official Web site suspiciously had the full results quite quickly (less than 30 minutes after the draw), so one wonders exactly how many draws weren't done truly live tonight...

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