What's New On These Pages: June 2001

Next month: July 2001

• Saturday 30th June
  As usual, people only started to drift into the chat room some 10 minutes after the lottery show started. No problems with the live TV show commentary and draw, but the show surprised me by being able to state that the Extra jackpot of £10.5m had been won - before the show went off the air !

  I phoned Camelot about 15 minutes after the show to confirm that the Extra jackpot had been won but they, in typical style, wouldn't confirm it and were as surprised as I was that the show announced that there was an Extra jackpot winner.

  Anyway, I finally got the full results almost an hour after the main draw and there was indeed a solitary Extra jackpot winner. I put up the full results before ITV and BBC teletext of course...

• Wednesday 27th June
  Tonight's double rollover predictably had a pretty good turnout in the chat room for the live TV show commentary and draw, which went by without any problems. As usual, the larger-than-normal sales delayed the issuing of the full results until about an hour after the draw, but I still beat BBC and ITV teletext to putting up the full results.

• Tuesday 26th June
  Bought four extra tickets for tomorrow's double rollover. Also added a META tag to all pages to stop IE6's highly dubious Smart Tags from "ruining" the lottery pages. Also wiped off Windows 95 off the PC I took home from work (an ancient Pentium I 133 Mhz) and put on Red Hat Linux 7.1 on it instead.

• Saturday 23rd June
  As usual, people are gradually getting "smarter" about when to come into the chat room when the broadcast time remains fixed for a few weeks. It took 10 minutes of the TV show before anyone surfaced, but then it was reasonably occupied until well after the show had finished.

  No problems with the live TV show commentary or draw and I put the full results up about 50 minutes after the draw, which meant that I beat both ITV and BBC teletext to them.

• Friday 22nd June
  Bought two more tickets for tomorrow's rollover draw.

• Wednesday 20th June
  No problems with this evening's live TV show commentary and draw, even if the lottery TV show sacrificed one third of its running time (the first 5 minutes) to the abysmal Ground Force show that preceded it. Camelot didn't release the full results for about an hour after the draw, but I still beat BBC and ITV teletext to the update.

• Saturday 16th June
  Tonight's usual tedium of the 45-minute "Winning Lines" show was alleviated when I switched over to Eurosport's live Le Mans coverage with nearly 10 minutes left. Yes, idiotically, the BBC complete all three draws with 10 minutes of the show to go, allowing me to switch off or over then ! No problems doing the live TV show commentary or draw in the chat room, but we had network problems about 15 minutes after the draw that weren't resolved for about 90 minutes.

  By then, of course, I'd updated the pages with the full results, but no-one could see them (so someone probably beat me to the full results on the Net, which is extremely unusual).

• Friday 15th June
  Bought two more tickets for tomorrow's rollover draw.

• Wednesday 13th June
  It looks like more people realised that the lottery show is 10 minutes earlier than usual on Wednesdays now, so we got a reasonable crowd in tonight. No problems with the live TV show commentary and draw, but it was annoying to have to wait over 50 minutes for them to release the full results (but I still got them up first).

• Saturday 9th June
  The dreaded Winning Lines returned tonight (with Philip Schofield instead of Simon Mayo), but despite some minor rule changes, they still pointlessly put the long-winded "Wonderwall" round after the main and Extra draws, which no doubt resulted in a mass switch over to the "other side". Boy, are the BBC stupid at programme content planning or what ?

  We had a reasonable number of folks in the chat room to watch my live TV show commentary and draw go fine. Camelot took an age to release the full results (just over an hour) as usual and I was the first to put them up.

• Wednesday 6th June
  The Greece vs. England live soccer game on BBC 1 (which England won 2-0) caused the lottery to start almost 90 minutes later than usual (at 9.55pm). People managed to stagger in as the draw was about to begin and there was no problem with the live commentary and draw in the chat room.

  Camelot, as usual, promptly close their lottery phone line at 11.00pm on draw evening - I got the full results from the line barely 5 minutes before the line shut for the night. Having got them, I easily beat both ITV and BBC teletext to the full results.

• Saturday 2nd June
  No problems tonight with the live TV show or commentary in the chat room (and there were a fair number of visitors tonight). Good old Texas performed a dubious 2001 remix of I Don't Want A Lover and I finally managed (after being put on hold several times because of the 50 winners of the 5+bonus and jackpot tiers) to get the full results about 75 minutes after the draw. I easily beat BBC and ITV teletext to them of course.

Previous month: May 2001

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