What's New On These Pages: July 1999

Next month: August 1999

• Wednesday 28th July
  There were already some keen 3 or 4 people in the chat room when entered with about 10 minutes before the TV show started. It turned out that my TV mag (TV Times) had the name of tonight's show completely wrong - they claimed it was National Lottery Greatest Hits, but it was actually National Lottery Love Songs (they've corrected the mistake in next week's issue). The live TV show commentary and draw went fine and I was the first to put up the full results.

• Saturday 24th July
  The chat room was fairly busy tonight and the lottery TV show commentary and draws went fine. Needless to say, Camelot were deadly slow to release the full results (in fact, first word was from BBC 1's lottery update some 55 minutes after the draw !), taking almost an hour to release them, which is ridiculous really. Changed my Saturday jackpot estimate to £7m for a normal draw.

• Wednesday 21st July
  Yet more moronic visitors to the lottery chat room tonight - I gave them plenty of rope to hang themselves and, sure enough, they did, resulting in them being banned. The chat room server played up a bit just as the show was about to start, but a few kills and restarts later and it was back up and running. The live TV show commentary and draw went fine and I put up the full results faster than anyone else.

• Saturday 17th July
  The chat room was fairly busy tonight, although people seemed to want to talk about anything but the lottery (including the guy I banned on Wednesday for being annoying - with a fresh IP address, he came back in and continued being a complete idiot, albeit with several pseudonyms).

  The live TV show commentary and draw went OK and then we had to twiddle our thumbs for about an hour again - just like last Saturday - as Camelot contemplated their navel. I scanned in last week's winning cheque at last and put it on the appropriate page (How Much I've Spent...).

• Thursday 15th July
  Bought two more tickets for Saturday's £20m Super Draw.

• Wednesday 14th July
  It was fairly quiet in the lottery chat room tonight - maybe everyone was off celebrating Bastille Day...er, nope, that's France, not the UK :-) The live TV show commentary and draw went OK, although I had to ban one obnoxious user from the chat room because he was being pretty annoying.

  The BBC lottery update beat Camelot to announcing the number of jackpot winners, but the real shocker was the total lack of 5+bonus winners. Annoyingly, Camelot couldn't tell me on the night what the 5+bonus amount was that wasn't won (and BBC and ITV teletext both failed to display it too), but my formula verifier calculated it anyway. I'll contact Camelot tomorrow to confirm the figure, but I went through it manually and the formula verifier was correct.

• Saturday 10th July
  It looks like people have sussed that it's not worth coming into the lottery chat room until about 5 minutes before the Thunderball draw because the first 15 minutes of the TV show didn't see a single visitor. Fortunately, it got busier as the TV show progressed and the commentary and draws went fine.

  The by-now traditional long wait for the full results then ensued and it took an hour for Camelot to release them (too late for BBC 1's lottery update after Casualty, which was a bit embarrassing). I put the full results up before anyone else of course.

• Wednesday 7th July
  It was fairly busy in the lottery chat room, which was surprising considering the show was only five minutes long and rapidly run through by the BBC. The commentary (what little of it there was) and draw were fine and I put the full results up before anyone else. Didn't have time today at work to scan in the winning cheque I received yesterday.

• Tuesday 6th July
  Received my £10 cheque from Camelot for Saturday's win.

• Saturday 3rd July
  It was very quiet indeed in the lottery chat room - the first other person to enter the room came in after the Thunderball draw had taken place ! I did both the Thunderball and main lottery draws live, although Camelot took an age to get the full results (over 50 minutes) and BBC 1's lottery update beat me by about a minute or two because of Camelot's ridiculous delay.

  Even then, it took some while longer to get the Thunderball total prize pool and ticket sales figures - for some reason they weren't initially on Camelot's computer system. This gave me the opportunity to code for the eventuality that this might happen in the future (it's so rare, I hadn't originally coded for this in the pages). Oh, I won £10 today - my previous win was way back in August 1998 would you believe it.

  Corrected a bug with the Numerical Analysis pages to do with the upper range of "Thunderball only" pages (it should be 14 of course, but some of them wrongly used 34 !). Included Thunderball sales on the Ticket Sales page (in fact, there's now a separate sales index page in the Thunderball section that defaults to Thunderball sales).

Previous month: June 1999

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