- Monday 31st January
Received my annual subscription certificate today.
- Saturday 29th January
The chat room was again quiet tonight, with only a few more
coming in to watch just before the draw started. The live
commentary and draw went fine and I put up the full results
before anyone else.
- Friday 28th January
Received the £10 cheque for my Wednesday win today.
- Wednesday 26th January
The chat room was fairly quiet this evening - only 3 or 4
people drifted in, despite (or maybe because of) yet another
Wednesday lottery show revamp (Carol Smillie in something called
"UK 2000"). The live commentary and draw went fine and I was
the first to put up the full results.
Perhaps the two biggest cheers of the evening were local soccer
club Tranmere Rovers getting through to their first ever major
cup final (at Wembley) and my first lottery win - only £10 though -
of the new millennium.
- Saturday 22nd January
The official Liverpool FC site updating is taking way too much of my time
on Saturdays - I was online from about 2.00pm through to 9.30pm today,
slipping in the lottery draw inbetween LFC Web site updates.
Only a few people came in the chat room during the draw (which was
no bad thing - I was rather knackered by then !) and the commentary
and draw went fine.
I was the first to put up the full results, although Camelot were rather
sluggish with the full Thunderball results (I eventually got the
ticket sales figure off them at about 10.00pm).
- Wednesday 19th January
BT fixed my faulty ISDN this morning at about 10.45am, so in theory I should
have had a smooth live draw update. Everything was fine in the hour leading
up to the draw, but then my session went very sluggish (freezes of 30 seconds)
only about a minute before the draw was due to begin,
so I had to do a bunch of clicks in advance and wait for them actually
get through to the Web site 30 seconds later !
The upshot of this is that I didn't actually have a truly live update, but
it was less than 30 seconds after the draw when I updated the chat room and
Web page, so I probably still beat everyone else anyway :-) After disconnecting
and getting a clean connection, I put up the full results before anyone else
(despite having to wait for someone to get off the house phone...).
- Tuesday 18th January
Sent off my sixth annual subscription (for £208 - 2 tickets a draw
for a year) today. I panicked a bit when I got home tonight because the
linebox on my BT ISDN home connection had failed (no LED lit on it). I
phoned up BT's fault line and reported it, but no home Net connection for
me this evening...
- Saturday 15th January
Well, today I spent many hours online updating the official
Liverpool FC site that we launched yesterday (1.2m hits in
one day !), so I sandwiched the lottery site updating inbetween
all that. The lottery room was only moderately busy (no
double rollover to pull the punters in today, sadly) and the
live commentary and draw went OK.
I was the first to put up the full results as usual. Camelot
have offered to include me in their survey about how good their
telephone line service is. It's generally OK, though the
length of time Camelot take to issue the full results on a
draw evening is frustrating, plus they had me on hold for
3 minutes at a time during Wednesday's double rollover (they
need to have more lines and staff in order to cope with the
extra demand). At one point on Wednesday, Camelot's entire
phone system was busy and you couldn't even get on to sit in the
hold queue !
- Friday 14th January
Just for the record, I now have a mobile phone (paid for by work...), so
I can phone Camelot from anywhere now :-)
- Wednesday 12th January
I entered the chat room tonight (after a bit of pre-advertising in the
Liverpool FC chat room :-) ) about 10 minutes before the TV show, only to
find about 15 people already in there, which was a pre-show record I suspect.
Most of them hung around for the draw and there were still people coming
in afterwards too. Looks like too many people registered for the live update
system tonight (4 in all, including me), which caused the system enough
problems so that it didn't actually seem to do anything :-(
This lead to an annoyingly auto-refreshing home page (sans results)
for several minutes whilst I frantically reconstructed the data file I needed
for the results (numbers, draw order, ball set and so on). Got it sorted in
less than 5 minutes, but it was annoying. The live draw in the chat room, by
contrast, was quite normal, though someone claimed they had the preliminary
jackpot results (6 winners, yeah right) from teletext, but I was sceptical
myself.
I phoned up Camelot several times during the evening and it took about 4
calls (including holds for 3 minutes at a time and one case where I had
to redial after their entire system was busy) to finally get the full
results through some 50 minutes after the draw. Despite the aggro, this still
beat BBC 1's lottery update (who embarrassingly had to admit there were no
results yet for the biggest Wednesday draw ever, leaving viewers in the dark
for a further hour) and even both BBC teletext and ITV teletext had nothing
when my pages updated at around 9.50pm. As for the official site, well they'd
managed to get the winning numbers up before I put the full results up, but
the less said about them the better :-) Their number search is faulty if you
use dates and they've transposed the drawn-ordered numbers for draws 418 and
419, which isn't too clever either...
Restored some more data (not quite all of it unfortunately) for the
PLUSLotto pages, but it brings it closer to being "correct".
- Tuesday 11th January
Bought four more extra tickets for tomorrow's double rollover.
Brought PLUSLotto section more up-to-date (still some figures
to get, but the main stuff is there).
- Saturday 8th January
I was expecting a bit more activity in the chat room tonight,
especially for the first ever "true" rollover Super Draw
(i.e. where the rollover amount is added to, rather than
absorbed into, the originally announced £20m Super Draw
jackpot). As it turned out, 3 or 4 people drifted in and
saw my live TV show commentary and draws.
I was the first to announce that the jackpot wasn't won
despite Camelot taking about an hour after the draw to
announce the results, which will result in a rather
exciting double rollover draw next Wednesday - the biggest
Wednesday UK lottery draw ever !
- Friday 7th January
Bought two more tickets for tomorrow's rollover Super Draw.
- Wednesday 5th January
It was fairly quiet in the chat room tonight and the live TV show
commentary and draw went OK. I was the first to put up the full
results, but I didn't stay long post-draw in the chat room because
I was upgrading our main MerseyWorld site to use Oracle 8 instead
of Oracle 7 this evening would you believe it.
- Saturday 1st January
Strangely, there were three New Zealand visitors to the chat room tonight
(yes, all three were in at once at one point) - something to so with the
first industrialised nation to see in the new millennium I guess :-) The
live TV show commentary and draw went fine, though it took an hour for the
main lottery results to come through and about 80 minutes in total for the
Thunderball info.
Well, lots of fiascos in the two Big Draw 2000 games - I've got them
listed in the Notes section of the results
page. Yes, there were actually people in the chat room for both of the
draws (more for Game 1 than Game 2 as you might expect), though I didn't have
any fancy animated balls for them to look at. Even the results page was
hand-constructed (it was a one-off, so no point in writing code for something
that will be thrown away as soon as it is run), although I was annoyed to
see that ITV teletext had the full results before Camelot's 9.00am
phone line embargo. I had the full results up a few minutes after 9.00am
myself.
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