What's New On These Pages: November 2001

Next month: December 2001

• Wednesday 28th November
  No problems tonight in the lottery chat room, even if it was fairly quiet (not many regulars and most of them left shortly after the draw as usual). No shock either to see BBC teletext beat Camelot's phone line to the full results by some 10-15 minutes yet again - I just don't know what's up with their full results service nowadays :-(

• Saturday 24th November
  It was very quiet tonight in the lottery chat room, with only a few souls drifting in for the draws. No problems with the commentary, but Camelot were simply disgraceful with the amount of time they took to release the full results - something like 80 minutes after the draw (one of the worst ever) and a full 15 minutes after BBC teletext ! I had a good rant at them and will speak to someone high up at Camelot about this on Monday - it's crazy that BBC teletext are being fed the full results significantly before Camelot's phone line.

• Wednesday 21st November
  The chat room was moderately busy tonight as the 10 minute show's commentary and draw went by reasonably smoothly. This time, I phoned Camelot earlier than recent draws and they came through with the full results about 40 minutes after the draw, although BBC teletext managed to beat me by a few minutes (that's 4 draws they've got it faster - c'mon Camelot, get your act together...).

• Saturday 17th November
  Well, we're back to the dreadful pain of a 45 minute lottery show tonight, although it didn't cause any problems for the live TV show commentary and draw in the chat room. As I might have guessed, Camelot performed dismally at issuing the full results for the third draw in succession - taking some 70 minutes for the main results, 75 minutes for the Extra results and 80 minutes for the Thunderball results - all of which were beaten to by some margin by BBC teletext. Just what is going on at Camelot ?

• Thursday 15th November
  Made the home page validate correctly as HTML 4.01 Transitional for the first time ever - a sort of "7th anniversary thing" if you will.

• Wednesday 14th November
  It was nice to see a 5 minute lottery TV show and a rollover draw on the same evening (rare to see both together). Whilst I had no problems with the two draws, it seems that Camelot's woefully inadequate full results performance on Saturday had permeated through to this evening too, as they took a staggering 70 minutes to issue the Wednesday results - one of the worst ever delays for a Wednesday draw.

  It's a shame about these delays (allowing BBC teletext to sneak ahead of me again) because tonight's draws were fairly special: record-breaking Wednesday Extra ticket sales, an Extra jackpot winner, less main lottery 5+bonus winners than jackpot winners and a handy £10 win for myself to top off things nicely.

• Tuesday 13th November
  Bought two more tickets for tomorrow's rollover.

• Saturday 10th November
  Thankfully, the lottery show was only 10 minutes long tonight, though that did mean a lot of frantic activity which saw 3 draws in the space of barely 5 minutes. What was even more surprising was that the number of main and Extra jackpot winners (none in either draw) were announced less than one minute after the end of the Extra draw, which must have been a record surely ?

  Despite the ultra-rapid jackpot announcement, we then saw an appallingly slow delivery time of some 75 minutes before Camelot had the full results on their system. BBC teletext actually beat Camelot (and hence me) by a clear 15 minutes, which is one of the worst defeats of Camelot by teletext ever.

• Wednesday 7th November
  Another moderately busy night in the chat room as the TV show commentary and draws went OK. I put up the full results about 40 minutes after the draws and duly beat ITV and BBC teletext to them.

• Saturday 3rd November
  It was reasonably busy in the lottery chat room tonight and the live TV show commentary and show went well. Camelot were reasonably quick (about 50 minutes) to issue the results after the draw, though BBC teletext seemed to update around the same time as I did. As seems to be the case in recent weeks, ITV teletext lagged behind both BBC teletext and myself.

• Friday 2nd November
  Bought two more tickets for tomorrow's £20m Super Draw.

Previous month: October 2001

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