What's New On These Pages: February 2002

Next month: March 2002

• Wednesday 27th February
  No problems with the TV show commentary and draw in the chat room tonight (had a reasonable number of people in for the draw). BBC teletext beat Camelot by a few minutes to the full results, but that's pretty well the norm nowadays.

• Saturday 23rd February
  The light went out in my bedroom just as the lottery show was about to start, so I did the whole TV show commentary and live draw in the dark in the chat room :-) There were a large number of people in the room tonight - about 20 in all - and I managed to get the full results well ahead of BBC and ITV teletext for a change.

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

• Wednesday 20th February
  There was a clash between my live text commentary in the official Liverpool FC chat room and the lottery TV show (second half of LFC vs. Galatasaray, which ended 0-0), so I wasn't in the lottery chat room for the live draw, but did manage to do a live Web update instead.

  Despite my failure to spot a bad data line in my Extra lottery data file until full time in the soccer game (causing the winning Extra numbers not to be displayed on the site for some 40 minutes), I still managed to not only correct those but to put up the full results from Camelot before BBC and ITV teletext, which was nice compensation for the data file problem.

• Saturday 16th February
  The live TV show commentary and draw went fine in the chat room, though as usual BBC teletext beat Camelot (albeit by a few minutes this time).

• Wednesday 13th February
  No problems with the lottery TV show commentary and draw in the chat room tonight - the usual suspects turned up and I kept a running score going of the England match too (final score: 1-1 vs. Holland). Surprisingly, both myself and ITV teletext beat BBC teletext tonight to release the full results.

• Monday 11th February
  Removed the "No prior wins for any of the tickets" option from the Lucky Dip page for the main lottery. This is because the amount of CPU time needed to find a random ticket that matches this criterion is now excessive (less than 100 ticket combinations have failed to win any prize to date). The option is still there for the Thunderball Lucky Dip page though.

• Saturday 9th February
  No problems with tonight's live TV show commentary and draw in the chat room (even if the show did start 5 minutes late). Surprisingly, the TV show announced the number of jackpot winners (7) for the £20m Super Draw at the end of the show - could this be the first time they've ever done this for a Super Draw ? Of course, the post-draw full results - as ever - came out on BBC teletext about 5-10 minutes before Camelot had them...

• Friday 8th February
  Bought two more tickets for tomorrow's Super Draw, which means I've now spent an additional £100 in all on Super Draws.

• Wednesday 6th February
  The lottery show started three and a half minutes, but they still managed to squeeze in the dull Jet Set quiz before the two draws tonight, the commentary of both of which were fine in the lottery chat room. As has been the case for months now, BBC teletext beat Camelot by at least 5 minutes to the full results.

• Saturday 2nd February
  No problems with tonight's TV show commentary and draw in the chat room and - miracles upon miracles - Camelot's phone line even managed to beat BBC teletext to the full results, albeit only by a few minutes.

Previous month: January 2002

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