What's New On These Pages: March 2000

Next month: April 2000

• Friday 31st March
  Bought two more tickets for tomorrow's rollover draw.

• Wednesday 29th March
  The live TV show commentary and draw went fine (cherish it - the show is a record one hour long next Wednesday) and I was the first to put up the full results. Spotted a £1 discrepancy in the jackpot prize again (usual rounding problem), which I informed Camelot about.

• Saturday 25th March
  As usual, I had my "10-minute boycott" of the lottery whilst taping Dilbert on Sky Digital, but I didn't miss anything useful in the dreadful 45-minute long Red Alert lottery show. The live commentary of the draws went fine and I was the first to put up the full results.

• Friday 24th March
  Bought two more tickets for tomorrow's rollover draw.

• Wednesday 22nd March
  As is the case on most Wednesdays, ITV had European football competing directly again the lottery show, so I drummed up some extra visitors by doing some promotion of the live lottery draw in the Liverpool FC chat room.

  There were about half a dozen people in the room during the draw, which went smoothly. Camelot were a bit slow getting the full results, so the BBC lottery update announced the lack of a jackpot winner before Camelot could tell me that, plus ITV teletext had the 5+bonus and jackpot tiers up a few minutes before I put the full results up. Still beat the ever-tardy BBC teletext though.

• Saturday 18th March
  In an altogether calmer lottery update (though I was recording Dilbert on Sky One until 7.30pm, so didn't even bother to listen to first 10 minutes of the dreadful Red Alert lottery show) compared to last Wednesday, the live TV show commentary and draw went fine. I was the first to update with the full results as well.

• Wednesday 15th March
  It was a bit chaotic to say the least tonight - I was doing both the live commentary of Liverpool vs. Aston Villa and the live lottery draw (I had to forsake TV show live comms and just draw the balls in the chat room and update the Web pages). No chance to check if I'd beaten ITV or BBC teletext either.

• Tuesday 14th Match
  I bought two extra tickets for tomorrow's rollover.

• Saturday 11th March
  We're still suffering the abysmal 45-minute torture that is the Lulu-fronted Red Alert lottery TV show, though there was a bit of excitement in the Thunderball draw when Alan Dedicoat read out the number 6 Thunderball as number 9 instead and the BBC computer graphic showed 9 too (it wasn't corrected !). Alan Dedicoat vocally corrected the ball, but it was embarrassing that the graphics weren't corrected.

  Needless to say, this livened up the Thunderball draw in the chat room no end - but I just used the delete ball function that allowed me to delete the 9 ball and replace it with a 6, so no problems there. The main draw's bonus ball was indeed 9, to add a bit of irony to the proceedings. I put the full results up before the BBC 1 lottery update, but I didn't cross-check them with teletext this evening.

• Wednesday 8th March
  The live TV show commentary and draw went fine tonight - enjoy the 10 minute show while you can...next month it goes up to an hour (of Dale Winton) ! I was the first to put up the full results (at first I thought BBC 1 teletext had beaten me but I was looking at Saturday's results, not tonight's). BTW, my mother was 63 today, so I got her three identical "happy 21st birthday" cards :-)

• Saturday 4th March
  The live commentary and draws in the chat room were fine and I was the first to put up the full results on the pages.

• Wednesday 1st March
  I keep having trouble for some reason trying to get into the lottery chat room nowadays - takes me three or four attempts and I usually have more success with Netscape 3.X than 4.X (let's blame the recently released 4.72 :-) ). Once in the room, the live commentary went OK (and people came in from the Liverpool FC chat room as usual...) and the draw was fine too.

  If you'd kept an eye on the Countdown applet used on the hi-res index page yesterday, you'd have spotted a leap year bug in its calculations (it was one day out). Fortunately, it was happy again today, so I haven't bothered to see our Java programmer to get it fixed...

Previous month: February 2000

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