What's New On These Pages: December 2002

Next month: January 2003

• Saturday 28th December
  The final draws of 2002 passed by with a reasonably busy chat room and not a huge amount to talk about (except for the £70m won by a bloke in West Virginia this week of course). The official Web site was the quickest with the full results, albeit just over an hour after the draws took place.

• Wednesday 25th December
  Finished off the "missing" figures from last night (mainly sales stuff) by phoning Camelot this morning. Fixed the Wednesday-only draw checks in my lottery code, so that they look for a "midweek" day of either Tuesday or Wednesday now. Completed the manual draw comments somewhat later than usual (Christmas Day is a busy "offline" day for me).

• Tuesday 24th December
  Well, what a mess the main lottery show was - despite having a 15 minute long programme, which should have been enough to do the five draws, they decided that interviewing Kat from EastEnders was far more important, wasting almost 5 minutes of precious air time on her. There were a fair number of people in the lottery chat room for the draws, but it was a good job I was videotaping the show because the BBC refused to air the Thunderball or Extra draws live, just leaving a 9-second caption up with the sorted numbers instead.

  Getting the full results was a nightmare - it didn't help that Camelot closed their phone line down for the night only 45 minutes after the draws took place, so they didn't have the full results until 9.00am the next day. The official lottery Web site was up to its usual trick of emulating a yoghurt carton and a piece of string (i.e. up to 5 minutes to load any page) and BBC teletext took an age to put up the full results (though they seemed to be the first to say there were three main Lotto jackpot winners, albeit over 90 minutes after the draws took place). The official site also failed to display any Extra info (even the winning numbers !) all evening, which wasn't good.

  Added a section for this year's Christmas Millionaire Maker. Once the pages had been updated after this evening's draws, it was clear that this first-ever Tuesday draw for the regular games (main, Extra and Thunderball) had messed up my "Wednesday-only" draw checks, so I'll fix that tomorrow.

• Saturday 21st December
  Present-wrapping done, we had a better influx of visitors to the chat room tonight as the rollover came and went without a hitch. Full results appeared on the official lottery site first, about an hour after the draw.

• Thursday 19th December
  Bought two more tickets for Saturday's single rollover draw.

• Wednesday 18th December
  Perhaps we're getting too close to Christmas now (people wrapping up presents and going to parties I guess), but the chat room was pretty quiet all evening, with no more than 3 visitors in simultaneously. The live TV show and commentary went fine, although the official site took about an hour to release the full results, which was somewhat slow.

• Saturday 14th December
  The chat room was quite busy for the three draws tonight, which passed without incident (although I did mis-hear one number, I corrected it very quickly in the room). Camelot's official site, althoguh being first on the scene with the full results, took an age to release them (some 75 minutes in fact).

• Thursday 12th December
  Bought two more tickets for tomorrow's rollover draw.

• Wednesday 11th December
  The lottery chat room was moderately busy (no-one bothering to tune into Euro footy I guess) and the live draw and commentary in there went fine. The official site was the first with the full results, about an hour after the draws were completed.

• Saturday 7th December
  It was a fairly quiet evening in the chat room tonight (only a few of the usual suspects turned up) and the draw/commentary went ahead fine as usual. The official site took about 50 minutes after the draws to release the full results, with BBC teletext lagging well behind that. I almost fell off my chair when it was announced that there were two Extra jackpot winners tonight :-)

  Thunderball draws have no rollovers or Super Draws, but ever since it started, the sales figures CGI program had been highlighting these (and mentioning it in the Notes: section). This was finally fixed tonight - there's no bolding of the Thunderball sales figures any more (hopefully it won't take me 3.5 years to fix the next Thunderball site bug...).

• Wednesday 4th December
  It was surprisingly quiet in the chat room tonight (only a few die-hards trickled in during the draw itself and, as usual, more people turned up after the draw), though there were no problems with the TV show commentary and live draws. The official Camelot site took an age (just over an hour) to put up the full results with BBC teletext trailing it quite a while later (so slow, in fact, I didn't wait for them).

Previous month: November 2002

© Richard K. Lloyd & Connect Internet Solutions Limited  2024