What's New On These Pages: May 2000

Next month: June 2000

• Wednesday 31st May
  Earth: Final Conflict nicely finished just as the draw was about to take place, so I caught the whole thing "live", although the 0.72 seconds delay on the Sky Digibox (nothing is ever truly "live" with digital TV !) meant some jokesters in the chat room were able to type the numbers slightly ahead of me. I beat ITV and BBC teletext to the full results, even though I had to spend some time cajoling someone off our house phone to get to use it to phone Camelot.

• Saturday 27th May
  For a change, there was no Digibox clash, so we had "fun" in the lottery chat room seeing if we could answer the Winning Lines questions quicker than the contestants. Not exactly difficult when they were taking 5-6 seconds to answer even the easiest of questions.

  As for the TV show commentary and draw, that all went fine, but then I had to endure and interminable wait of an hour for Camelot to finally issue the full results (50 minutes for the main lottery and further 10 minutes for the Thunderball).

  ITV teletext were surprisingly quick tonight on both counts, though the latter was explained by them using last week's Thunderball draw's number of winners instead of this week's (but they still labelled them as 27th May results...). They eventually fixed this after a couple of hours.

• Wednesday 24th May
  The lottery show had to compete with the second half of the Champions League Final between Real Madrid and Valencia, so I suspect it lost out big time. Still, there were quite a few people in the lottery room and the draw went well. I'm not sure if I beat ITV and BBC teletext to the full results because I missed getting the results by a couple of minutes in a phone call to Camelot (so the next call wasn't for a further 5 minutes and teletext probably updated whilst I taking that call, grrr...).

• Saturday 20th May
  Looks like I've got a Saturday Digibox clash on Saturdays too now - Caroline in the City on the Paramount Comedy Channel clashes with the Thunderball (footnote: I think the episodes are actually repeats, so the clash isn't a problem), so I was flicking backwards and forwards during the Thunderball draw to get the numbers :-) Luckily, that went fine, as well as the main lottery draw (which had lousy prizes thanks to a large number of winners). I was the first to put up the full results as well.

• Wednesday 17th May
  As usual, Earth: Final Conflict took viewing priority over the lottery show for me, so it was Radio 5 Live again (this time covering the whole draw, including the machine and ball set) for me tonight, even though the lottery "show" was only a few minutes long at half time in Arsenal's dreadful UEFA Cup performance against Galatasaray (which they deservedly lost on penalties).

  There seemed to be a lot of people (possibly from the LFC chat room ?) in the lottery chat room when I entered and the live draw went OK. I was the first to put up the full results as well.

• Tuesday 16th May
  Bought four more tickets for tomorrow's double rollover draw.

• Sunday 14th May
  I phoned up Camelot today to fill in the gaps in info I needed (that isn't available anywhere else in the universe, such as ticket sales) and confirmed that they'd given away the full 1 million Thunderball tickets last week (the week's sales were £82,774,240).

• Saturday 13th May
  Isn't it just my luck that the first live update I couldn't do in about 3 years (went to a wedding party) resulted in a double rollover draw ? Arrgh ! It looks like the live updates system may have worked - I didn't get in until 1.30am on Sunday morning to fully update (well, as much as I could) the results.

• Friday 12th May
  Brought PLUSLotto stats up-to-date because they hadn't been sending correct updating e-mails to the auto-updating system, so it had been rejecting them.

• Thursday 11th May
  Bought two more tickets for Saturday's rollover - unfortunately, my 40-to-1 chance of winning a free Thunderball ticket didn't pan out.

• Wednesday 10th May
  I decided to try using just Radio 5 Live for the lottery draw tonight (due to the Earth: Final Conflict clash on Sky One), which was both a good and bad thing. Good because the idiots at the BBC made the draw 5 minutes early (seriously overlapping E:FC) so they could show some pointless highlights of previous Wednesday night lottery shows for the 5 mins after the draw had taken place. Bad because Radio 5 Live is utterly pants reception-wise - it crazily only broadcasts on AM, so reception generally swings to from bad to atrocious.

  To top it all off, Radio 5 Live joined as the first number was being drawn, so no prize fund, estimated jackpot, machine or ball set was read out like they are on the TV show. Luckily, I video taped the lottery show and was able to get the necessary info off tape a few minutes after the draw had ended. The icing on the cake, though, was the AM drift my radio suffered as one of the balls (37) was being read out. I only caught the "7" bit and put up the wrong number in the chat room and home page for a short period. I did correct it of course, but it was annoying. Radio 5 Live - get the heck onto FM will you ! No, I can't use my Digibox for Radio 5 Live...it was airing E:FC of course.

  I suspect BBC teletext just beat me to putting up the full results by a few minutes (was hassling someone to get off the phone in our house, which didn't help). Found out later in the evening that I've been invited to a wedding party on Saturday night, so I won't be able to do any Live Updates myself for the rollover draw. I'll have to rely on people out there to "behave" and put up the numbers correctly (fat chance :-) ).

• Saturday 6th May
  There were intranet problems for about half the workstations including my usual office machine I generate the lottery pages on, so I used an alternative (slower) one instead. The live TV show commentary and draws went fine in the chat room and I had the full results up by 8.45pm (presumably ahead of teletext, but I didn't bother checking).

• Wednesday 3rd May
  I was busy commentating on Liverpool vs. Leicester City tonight on the official Liverpool FC site, so I only had time to do the Live Update (I didn't want to enter the chat room because my browser might crash - which it did twice during the commentary anyway). I worked through the update tasks after the full time whistle and got the full results up after the first call to Camelot at around 9.50pm or so. I didn't bother checking teletext because they probably beat me this time for a change.

Previous month: April 2000

© Richard K. Lloyd & Connect Internet Solutions Limited  2024