What's New On These Pages: December 2006

Next month: January 2007

• Thursday 28th December
  Bought two more tickets (online) for Saturday's main Lotto single rollover draw.

• Wednesday 27th December
  Had more problems with our intranet filestore server, but sorted out recovering the code I needed about an hour after the draw, so not too much manual editing this time.

• Saturday 16th December
  If last Wednesday's new Excalibur 7 Thunderball machine wasn't enough, Camelot added a 14th (!) machine name to the main Lotto tonight - Sapphire (yep, another green gemstone that they've fixated on ever since the Dream Number launch).

• Thursday 14th December
  No rollover excuse for Camelot to fall back on this time as, for the second consecutive set of midweek draws, there were no full results before midnight on Wednesday night/Thursday morning! The main Lotto results did turn up shortly after midnight, but I got bored and picked up the info from BBC teletext instead.

  The introduction of a new Thunderball machine last night - Excalibur 7 - caused a bit of chaos with my pages, but I've sorted the issues out now. I phoned up Camelot to find out exactly how many Thunderball machines there are now and there's apparently now six. Yes, you read that right - just six, not seven!

  Turns out there's "no Excalibur 6 because we've switched to an odd-numbering scheme for new Thunderball machines from now on [no, I don't know why], but Excalibur 2 and 4 were available before the numbering scheme switch, so they are exceptions to this". Have you ever heard of such a wacked-out machine numbering scheme in your entire life?! BTW, the Voice of the Balls on the lottery TV show (Alan Dedicoat) keeps saying "the machine Excalibur was used". Wrong - each Excalibur machine has a number as well...

• Thursday 7th December
  Yes, last night was a rollover draw, but that's still a flimsy excuse for not putting the main Lotto draw full results on the official Camelot site until 12.10am this morning and failing to put any other full results (OK, Daily Play was up, but that had been done by its usual 8.30pm time) up by the time I went to bed (1.15am) - very shoddy work from the official lottery site there.

  I got so bored waiting for the official site to update that I checked BBC 1 teletext (no full results) and eventually turned to the somewhat-cramped-on-9-subpages ITV teletext. To my surprise, they did have almost all the full results (only thing missing was some of the lower tier Thunderball info - bizarre that they have the full Dream Number and even Hotpicks tiers, but not Thunderball!). Added the info to this site and call it a day until later this morning....more updates here when I wake up and see if Camelot's Webmaster has finally remembered to do what should have been done hours earlier...which they did do sometime before 7.30am.

  I also finally received the "exciting news about the ticket" that I bought at 8.34am this morning, more than 8 hours after Camelot had put the main Lotto full results on their Website. Sure enough, they've credited the £10 to my online account for the first time ever - hooray! Apparently, the account was credited at 3.45am this morning.

• Wednesday 6th December
  I finally won a £10 prize tonight on my fourth ticket, so went to the official site 10 minutes after the draw and logged into my account, only to find 2 lies on that ticket's page: "This draw has not yet taken place." (wrong) and "Not Drawn" (also wrong). Meanwhile, this site's ticket checker was happily telling me that I'd won £10 only 2 minutes after the draw had finished...

  It'll also be a minor historic event for my online tickets - it'll be the first time that Camelot will have ever actually credited my online account (wins on an online subscription annoyingly get sent by cheque, even though I paid for the sub via a debit card).

• Saturday 2nd December
  Bought two more tickets (online) for next Wednesday's single rollover main Lotto draw.

Previous month: November 2006

© Richard K. Lloyd & Connect Internet Solutions Limited  2024