- Saturday 28th November
Didn't have anyone in the chat room until about 10 minutes before the
draw, but the live commentary and draw went smoothly anyway. Someone was
in the chat room again claiming they were a 5+bonus winner, but I ignored them
because you've got to be suspicious that it would mean two 5+bonus winners
have been in the chat room in the last fortnight.
We had a SCSI problem on the upgraded server, so the disks were moved from
one machine to another (identically spec'ed) one and the machine rebooted.
Luckily, nothing went wrong and we only had a few hours of downtime on
Saturday morning.
- Friday 27th November
Spent most of the day fixing minor problems that cropped up from
yesterday's upgrade. Also completed my home machine upgrade and
can now build these lottery pages fine on my home machine again.
Bought two more tickets for tomorrow's rollover.
- Thursday 26th November
We had about 90 minutes of downtime to upgrade this Web server to
a machine 2-3 times as powerful. It's also running HP-UX 11.00,
rather than 10.20. I also took a day off to upgrade my home machine
to HP-UX 10.20 (yes, behind the main server's OS, but my machine only
has a 1GB drive, which isn't big enough for 11.00).
- Wednesday 25th November
It was moderately busy in the chat room tonight, but the chat room paused
as the balls were drawn (good job we're upgrading the Web server tomorrow
night...) and only came back when the bonus ball had been drawn, which was
most annoying. There was still a live update via the home page though,
which wasn't affected. Camelot took ages to get the full results, so BBC 1
announced that it was a rollover just as I was generating the Web pages
with that very info !
Amazing that there were only two 5+bonus winners as well (looks like
everyone was avoiding the long-term absentee number 4, which finally came up).
- Monday 23rd November
Thanks to Saturday's £25m Super Draw, these pages have
set an all-time weekly record of 358,397 hits.
- Saturday 21st November
It was busy in the chat room again for tonight's live commentary on the
TV show and draw, which went fine. I was the first to put up the full
results of the 4th anniversary draw as usual. Easy Play sales theoretically
should have benefited from the Super Draw, but the reverse happened -
they dropped by more than £60,000 !
- Friday 20th November
Bought two more tickets for tomorrow's Super Draw, which means I've
now spent over £600 on the lottery since it began four years ago.
- Wednesday 18th November
There were about a dozen people in the chat room for the
TV show and commentary, which may well have been a record.
The live draw went OK, but I was annoyed with Camelot for
taking almost 40 minutes to release the full results -
after BBC 1 had already announced that there were
two jackpot winners !
- Saturday 14th November
It was moderately busy in the chat room during the TV show
and the live commentary and draw went fine. I was the fastest
to put the full results up as usual.
- Wednesday 11th November
There were half a dozen users in the lottery chat room tonight for
the live commentary and draw (they all came in before I did !).
One of them, "pattycakes", was shocked to discover they'd won
one of tonight's 5+bonus prizes of £87,861. Assuming this
win was validated, then this would be the largest amount won "live"
by someone in a UK lottery Internet chat room (talk about stretching
it :-) ).
Needless to say, I made sure that pattycakes got the Internet
exclusive on the 5+bonus prize amount - I announced it in the chat room
first and, of course, updated the Web pages with the info before
anyone else did. Received the latest sales figures fax from Camelot and duly
updated the Web pages.
- Saturday 7th November
The chat room was reasonably busy during the live commentary and draw,
but the strangest thing of the whole evening was that it was the
300th draw and Camelot and the BBC did absolutely nothing to
celebrate it (they are waiting for the 4th anniversary Super Draw
in a fortnight's time) !
Camelot took an absolute age to release the full results
compared to their usual 20-25 minutes that they've been achieving
recently. It took me 45 minutes after the draw to get the
full results up and this meant I tied with ITV teletext (and still
beat BBC teletext because they didn't have the complete set up, only
the jackpot tier).
- Friday 6th November
Received the latest sales figures fax from Camelot and duly added the info
to these pages.
- Wednesday 4th November
There were about half a dozen in the chat room tonight for the
live commentary and draw, with one keen soul actually in the
room 45 minutes before even the TV show started :-) The TV show
introduced a very small studio audience for the first time in
this run of Amazing Luck Stories Wednesday shows.
They pitifully and pathetically clapped to intro the show
and when each ball came out - very hilarious
I thought ! I was the first to put up the full results as usual.
- Monday 2nd November
I correctly guessed that Camelot would have a Super Draw for their
4th anniversary draw and phoned them up to confirm it.
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