- Saturday 29th July
I was annoyed that Sky One "died" at 3.00pm today
(new series of Melrose Place that I was taping) -
it wasn't just me either - it was a Sky fault. So I
was a bit worried about the Digibox tonight - no problems
with it though as we suffered through 30 minutes
of Des O'Connor.
The live commentary and draw went fine, but then there
an interminable wait of 55 minutes for the full results
from Camelot. By the time I got the results and updated
my pages, not only had the BBC 1 lottery update announced
the 3 jackpot winners, even BBC teletext had fully updated !
C'mon Camelot, it's silly that the BBC has the full results
before you do - you're the people running the lottery
for goodness sake !
- Thursday 27th July
Bought 2 more tickets for Saturday's rollover draw, though
the poor woman at W.H. Smith had problems getting the
terminal to accept the playslip (took over 2 minutes
of fiddling)...
- Wednesday 26th July
Having read on various newsgroups that the Panasonic
Sky Digibox has a new EPG upgrade, I forced an update
only 15 minutes before the lottery show started. Luckily
it worked (a new A-Z Listings section allowing you to
browse/jump through an alphabetical list of programmes
across all channels, rather than having to do per-channel
browsing in the EPG) and I was able to commentate in
the chat room on the over-long midweek show, which featured
Liverpool heavily (Louise and LIPA to be precise).
The live commentary went OK and I was the first to put
up the full results (announcing the lack of a jackpot
winner in the chat room a couple of minutes before BBC 1's
lottery update).
I won £10 for the second consecutive draw (only the
second time I've managed to so) and, at long last, it looks
like I've having a bit of luck on the lottery for a change.
- Tuesday 25th July
Bulk-updated the PLUSLotto results, although their own
www.lotto.li site was down when I went to it...
- Saturday 22nd July
I was recording athletics on Eurosport during the lottery TV
show, so I propped open some
doors to the upstair lounge and had the TV portable in there
blaring out the Winning Lines show, so that I could both
see and hear it from my bedroom :-) The draws (including a rollover)
went fine and I was the first to put up the full results, receiving
a nice bonus of a £10 win tonight for my efforts...
I was e-mailed a new 164-ticket wheel by D. Stojiljkovic and Rade Belic
(whose previous 167-ticket wheel was bettered by two in April
this year thanks to Salvatore Minacapelli) and it verified OK.
This made it the new Wheeling Challenge
outright record holder for guaranteeing a £10 win in the main
UK lottery in the least number of tickets.
- Friday 21st July
Bought two more tickets for tomorrow's rollover draw.
- Wednesday 19th July
Had a bit of trouble (good old chat room plus Netscape is
an awkward combination sometimes) getting into the chat
room to do the live commentary, so actually got in during
5ive's abysmal cover of the Queen classic We Will Rock You.
No problem with the live commentary and draw after that,
though BBC teletext may have just beaten me to the full
results (unusual for them to be so fast), but I did beat
ITV teletext.
- Saturday 15th July
The usual 40 minutes of Simon Mayo and his scripted quiz show
was interspersed with the two live draws, which went fine. I was
the first to put up the full results as well.
- Wednesday 12th July
Tonight's TV show was pointlessly 20 minutes long (half of which seemed
to involve Ronan Keating's fizzog), but at least it's not double the
length like Simon Mayo's effort on Saturday. The commentary and live
draw in the chat room went fine and I put the full results before anyone
else, even though there seemed to be a £1 discrepancy yet again
with a rollover draw.
I bought two extra tickets today for this rollover, but annoyingly
it would have been my 6th ticket that would have won £10 - I only
buy four extra tickets on top of my usual two subscription tickets
for double rollovers though.
- Monday 10th July
Reluctantly, I've added a robots.txt to the top-level of the site for the
first time. This is after persistent misbehaviour by the Lycos Spider
over the past year or so - every time it visits this lottery site, it
wrongly treats CGI-based links (that have GET parameters) as unique pages
(it should ignore all CGI GET parameters when testing for uniqueness).
Since I dynamically
generate the CGI links (e.g. see the Number Palace, Ticket Checker and so
on), then upwards of 500,000 hits are registered when the Lycos Spider comes
visiting. The robots.txt
I created has a disallow for /cgi-bin/ for the Lycos Spider, which
should hopefully stop it "spamming" the site in the future. It's amazing
that such a high profile spider could get its algorithm so completely and
utterly wrong.
- Saturday 8th July
As usual, we had to endure 40 minutes of brain rot in the form of the
Winning Lines quiz show, during which the two draws came and went
without a hitch in the lottery chat room and on the Web site. Camelot
then decided to be rather tardy with their full results (over 50 minutes
to issue them), but I still beat teletext to putting them up.
- Wednesday 5th July
We had a reasonably busy lottery chat room tonight for a
change (probably thanks to Euro 2000 ending) and the live
TV show and draw went OK. Even though Camelot was quite
slow releasing the full results (over 50 minutes), I still beat
BBC and ITV teletext to putting them up.
- Tuesday 4th July
Bought two more tickets for tomorrow's rollover in the midst of a torrential
downpour - we're lucky today wasn't a national holiday unlike some country
I could mention...
- Saturday 1st July
No Euro 2000 tonight, so Winning Lines returned and
it was the usual one or two die-hards who turned up in
the lottery chat room to see the two draws, which went
fine. I was the first to put up the full results as well.
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