What's New On These Pages: June 2000

Next month: July 2000

• Wednesday 28th June
  The BBC must have been smirking that the France vs. Portugal Euro 2000 game turned out to be less than enthralling, but ITV"s live coverage almost certainly would have dented the viewing figures for the lottery show, which was slipped in around half time on BBC 1 (even though the BBC weren't covering the match of course).

  Only a few (football-hating ?) hardy souls ventured into the chat room this evening and the draw went fine for those who wanted to see it. I put the full results up when the 90 minutes were up in the game, but it was likely that BBC and ITV teletext beat me to them, so I didn't bother checking them.

• Saturday 24th June
  No problems with turning up on time in the lottery chat room tonight, but just as everything looked like it was going smoothly, Netscape crashed on me as the first ball came out for the main lottery - very annoying ! I abandoned the live update and just did data file edits and page generation instead, going back into the room again to replay the draw for those who bothered to hang around. One compensation is that I was the first to put up the full results though.

• Wednesday 21st June
  I was late returning from a visit tonight, so I only got back just as the draw was starting and by the time I'd booted my workstation up and got a browser going, it had finished :-( I skipped the live update and did a result update on the Web pages instead. I still went into the chat room and did a "replay" of the draw for those who missed it, but it wasn't really the same.

  Annoyingly, Camelot took their merry time issuing the full results (they didn't release them until more than 5 minutes after the BBC 1 lottery update at 9.32pm). Because of this, BBC 1 teletext beat me by a few minutes (in fact, I ended up having to copy them from BBC 1 teletext, which is highly unusual because normally ITV teletext are quicker). I did, of course, confirm the info and get the ticket sales via a phone call to Camelot.

• Sunday 18th June
  Added manual comments to the individual main and Thunderball draw pages for last night's draws.

• Saturday 17th June
  Strangely enough, the lottery draw wasn't at half-time during the England vs. Germany game (won by England 1-0 for a change), but actually after the match at 10.00pm. This meant that the Thunderball and main lottery draws took place in only a five-minute show (hooray !), but it was touch and go whether the lottery line would have the full results before they closed at 11.00pm (yep, they decided not to extend the phone line hours).

  After calls every 8 minutes to Camelot, I eventually got the main draw results at around 10.55pm and the Thunderball results at 10.59pm (one minute to spare !). I was convinced that teletext would beat me to putting up the full results, but surprisingly they didn't (ITV teletext updated 15-30 minutes after me and BBC teletext took a couple of hours at least). I wanted to watch the Canadian F1 GP practice delayed coverage on ITV, so I left the manual updates until the following day.

• Wednesday 14th June
  I watched the Belgium vs. Italy Euro 2000 match on TV tonight (Italy won 2-0), switching to do the lottery update at half time. Some network problems meant the Java balls applet wasn't available, so I just typed the results into the chat room and updated the Web pages a few minutes later.

  I didn't phone Camelot for the full results until full time in the game, but surprisingly I still managed to beat BBC teletext to the full results (though it looks like ITV teletext beat me this evening).

• Saturday 10th June
  The poor old Winning Lines show was up against the first match of Euro 2000 tonight (Belgium beat Sweden 2-1 in quite a good match), but we still had a few hardy annuals in the chat room to see the lottery draws live, which seemed to go without a hitch (unlike Eurosport's commentary on the soccer game). I was the first to put up the full results.

  Had a bit of "fun" with Apache 2.0a4 on my home HP-UX box - whilst I eventually got it built, it just didn't run properly. The process ran for about 5 seconds and then quit with an exit code of 1, but with nothing written to the error_log or anything revealed by trace on the binary. Even re-compiling with gcc didn't help. I had to download Apache 1.3.12 and restore my previous config because I needed a Web server on my home box to view the lottery pages as I updated them for the manual comments of course !

• Wednesday 7th June
  The penultimate Earth: Final Conflict episode of the series nicely finished on Sky One 10 seconds before the lottery TV show switched to the draw, so I did the live draw (OK, 0.72 seconds time-lagged) fine by watching "BBC Widescreen" (yes, the silly name for BBC 1 on Sky Digital).

  I announced the number of jackpot winners and exact jackpot prize in the chat room at virtually the same time as the BBC 1 lottery update (which doesn't tell you the exact jackpot amount of course anyway) and had the full results up on the Web pages a few minutes after that (ahead of BBC and ITV teletext).

• Saturday 3rd June
  No Sky Digital clashes tonight, so it was on with the usual Winning Lines show, where myself and a few other hardy souls try to get the answers to the three quiz rounds without watching the TV screen (just hearing the questions).

  The two draws went fine, even if one prankster make up the numbers in the chat room (it happens from time to time). I was the first to put up the full results, as is usually the case.

Previous month: May 2000

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