- Saturday 28th October
Lots of "excitement" tonight as there was a rollover
draw, a new fifth machine used (Galahad) and
the first ever quadruple on the Thunderball. Despite
all of this, it was a quiet in the chat room to start
with, only building up a little during the show.
Although Camelot took an hour to release the full
results, I still put them up before anyone else.
The new machine, of course, caused some brief chaos
for my lottery code, but I'd sorted it out within 30
minutes of the news. Quite why Camelot dragged
Galahad out of storage 6 years into their
licence is beyond comprehension ! It also didn't
help that its initial clashed with Guinevere,
so my code represents Galahad with an "H"
internally.
- Wednesday 25th October
I suspect most people hadn't adjusted to the current
8.25pm start time (25 minutes earlier than usual)
for the Wednesday lottery show, so there were two
"waves" coming into the room - one for the draw and
another one 25 minutes late for it ! No problems with
the (brief) lottery TV show commentary and draw and
I was the first to put up the full results.
Fixed an annoying "feature" of the jackpot prize pool
estimation code - an unwon rollover Super Draw
(yes, one happened back in January this year) would
skew the calculations. I adjusted the code to treat
any Super Draw as the ending of a rollover sequence
(because the jackpot prize pool is skewed and shouldn't
be included in estimations). This fixed the estimated
prize pool for next Saturday (was £32m, now £10m).
- Saturday 21st October
Tonight's lottery show was only 10 minutes long (though
Dale Winton threatened a normal-length Saturday show
next week - boo hiss) and also 20 minutes later than
usual. No problems with the live commentary of the
TV show and two draws, though Camelot still took their
typical minimum 45 minutes on a Saturday to issue the
full results. Although I beat BBC teletext to them,
I wasn't sure whether ITV teletext got them up faster
or not.
- Wednesday 18th October
As usual we had live European soccer on ITV (Manchester
United no less) competing directly against the bizarre
sight of a Wednesday lottery draw taking place before
8.30pm for a change. There were some visitors to the
chat room (I wasn't expecting many because of the time
change and the live soccer on the other side) and
the TV show commentary - what little of it there was
for the 5 minutes duration - and draw went fine. I
was the first to put up the full results shortly after
9.00pm.
- Saturday 14th October
No problems with tonight's over-long (compared to next
Wednesday anyway) lottery show as Dale scrambled to get
his 3 musical guests and 2 draws done in the 20 minutes.
The TV show commentary and draws went fine in the chat room,
even if the room wasn't overly busy. I was the first to
put up the full results, only some 40 minutes after the
draw took place.
One trivia note for anoraks: This was the last time
I downloaded the lottery site changes to my HP-UX 10.20 home machine -
I'm upgrading to HP-UX 11.00 tonight (and probably much
of Sunday too)...wish me luck...
- Wednesday 11th October
It wasn't hugely busy tonight (multiple World Cup qualifier
soccer games on TV didn't help !), but that didn't stop
the usual TV show commentary and live draw, both of which
went fine. Camelot were also quite fast (just before 9.30pm)
to release the full results, so I was the first one to put
them up.
- Saturday 7th October
Again, a fairly quiet night tonight, though there was
a live World Cup soccer qualifier on Channel 5 at the same
time (Scotland playing San Marino) which won't have help
matters. The big let-down of the night was that instead of
having a Super Draw to celebrate the 500th lottery draw,
they dragged on the useless Spice Girls instead (and
after the draw too, so everyone had switched over
as soon as the balls had come out).
No problems with the live TV show commentary and draw,
plus Camelot had the full results in an unusually speedy
manner for them on a Saturday - by 8.40pm no less - which
meant I was the first to make them available of course.
- Wednesday 4th October
Another quiet night tonight, with only 2 or 3 people in
for tonight's draw (though considering our network problems
this week, that's probably 2 or 3 more than I thought would
turn up). No problems with the live TV show commentary or draw
and I was the first to put up the full results (even before
BBC 1's 9.35pm lottery update).
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