What's New On These Pages: July 2008

Next month: August 2008

• Monday 28th July
  Was contacted today by a BBC researcher for the daytime drama "Doctors" (a BBC 1 show I never watch because - like most people - I'm at work!). They were asking questions about the lottery and the claims procedure, so assume that there will be a lottery storyline on the show in the near future. And, no, I won't be watching it if it turns up :-)

• Saturday 26th July
  My subscription is due for renewal next month and Camelot recently sent me an e-mail saying that you can no longer subscribe for a fixed term (usually by debit card online, but I used to send a cheque offline until the last few years) and you now have to subscribe monthly via direct debit.

  This apparently came into effect last December and is generally better in several ways. Firstly, you don't have to remember to renew your subscription - you just let the direct debit run and run. Secondly, if you win up to £5,000, they not only send you a letter to tell you, they also automatically credit your bank account too. The old debit card subscription ludicrously sent you a cheque in the post (unlike buying single (non-subscription) tickets online via debit card, which credited your debit card with winnings as you'd expect).

  However, there is a snag for existing debit card subscribers - when you set up the direct debit, you can't state an exact start date or even an exact date of the month (e.g. 29th of every month) when the payment (which will be £18 a month for me) is taken out. I went right to the final page when applying for the direct debit and it stated the new sub would start 2 weeks before of the end of my existing subscription. Considering I'm not changing my tickets/draws/amount for the subscription, you'd think they'd compare the two subs and adjust the date, but no!

  It looks like I'll have to wait 2 weeks (and maybe a bit more) before trying again. It's better to have a gap between the two subs than an overlap, since with the former I can buy 2 tickets per draw online individually until the gap is filled, whereas with the latter, I'd be buying 2 identical sets of 2 tickets for each draw, which is pointless and costly.

• Saturday 5th July
  The Dream Number individual lottery page (and the related info on the home page) wouldn't generate properly - it was basically ignoring tonight's draw like it wasn't in the data file.

  I eventually tracked it down to bad logic which said that if the first two winning numbers are zero (which they were for tonight's draw), then it's not a valid data line. I've fixed the code now to not use the "double-zero" for Dream Number because that is a possible valid number combo, which made its debut for the first two digits tonight.

Previous month: June 2008

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