What's New On These Pages: September 1998

Next month: October 1998

• Wednesday 30th September
  It was pretty quiet in the chat room until about 10 minutes before the draw and then we got 4 or 5 people in, much to my relief. The live commentary and draw went fine and got the full results up faster than anyone else as usual.

• Sunday 27th September
  Added a transcription of the Vernons Easy Play Playing in a Group leaflet, although large chunks of it use the same wording as the equivalent leaflet for the main UK lottery. Added support for randomly generated Vernons Easy Play score draws for postponed fixtures. The awkward bit was that Vernons/Camelot don't reveal the actual random score (there isn't one, it's done with "home win", "away win", "score draw" and "no score draw" balls drawn from a machine), hence the appearance of a new "Random" column in the Vernons Easy Play score draw frequency table.

• Saturday 26th September
  The live TV show commentary and draw was fine, but the big news was that the 0845 9100 000 lottery phone line number didn't work for much of the day - it just rang and rang without the automatic system answering. The 0645 100 000 number was OK though and I used that to get the full results up before any else as usual.

• Wednesday 23rd September
  The live TV show commentary and draw went OK (a good half a dozen in the chat room for the draw) and I got the full results up before anyone else. The main number 28 appeared for the fifth draw in a row and, equally surprising and unique, 4 of the 7 numbers were also in Saturday's draw ! Received the latest sales figures fax from Camelot and duly updated the pages.

• Tuesday 22nd September
  Bought two more tickets for tomorrow's rollover.

• Saturday 19th September
  The first ever 5+bonus Super Draw live TV show commentary and draw went fine. Camelot were a little slow with the full results (about 45 minutes after the draw, but I was still faster than anyone else to put them up) and we had our first ever 5+bonus millionaires of course.

  Tried to code for tonight's 5+bonus Super Draw top-up, but there may be one or two glitches with it...we'll see. Umming and ahhing, I finally decided to buy two extra tickets for tonight's draw, even though it's not a jackpot top-up.

• Wednesday 16th September
  The live TV show and draw commentary went OK (I don't like the new music and sound effects when the draw takes place on the TV show though - I think they were first introduced last Wednesday and are pretty horrible). I put the full results up before anyone else.

• Tuesday 15th September
  Received the latest sales figures fax from Camelot and duly updated the pages.

• Saturday 12th September
  The live commentary and draw went well for me, but not so hot at all for the BBC TV show. They failed to display the computerised lottery balls live (i.e. as each real ball came out), though Alan Dedicoat gamely continued to read them out. A poor camera shot (not showing them all !) was used as a substitute, but it wasn't until Julie Goodyear had finished murdering a song that the BBC finally managed to show the computerised balls during the closing credits. Of course my site had the balls on the Web pages and in the Java chat room live :-)

  The tables were turned, though, when I came to phone Camelot for the full results. Thanks to over 3,000 people winning the Easy Play jackpot (each getting a measly £113), they jammed Camelot's phone lines - it took until nearly 9.00pm to get through. The silly thing is that some retailers will actually pay out £113, plus all Post Offices do, so you if you win under £200, you don't really need to phone Camelot at all (and there's no claim form to fill in for any win under £500 either). I got the full results up at about 9.00pm and still surprisingly beat everyone else to displaying them.

• Friday 11th September
  Bought two more tickets for tomorrow's rollover draw.

• Wednesday 9th September
  Predictably, tonight's live update was a spectacular mess because I was trying to juggle doing a live Liverpool vs. Coventry City commentary with the lottery updates, plus the Web server was misbehaving and I eventually had to reboot it at full time in the match. Somewhat bizarrely, I ended up doing the live draw in the lottery chat room to myself because no-one else could get in (plus the Live Updates Web system didn't work either - the CGIs just kept generating errors).

  Shortly after the Web server was rebooted, I put the full results up, still beating BBC teletext in the process despite all the problems ! Received the latest sales figures from Csmelot and duly added them to the pages.

• Saturday 5th September
  The live commentary and draw was OK today - had people from Cyprus, Greece and New Zealand in the chat room. I put the full results up before anyone else as usual.

  Corrected a bug in the calculation of the average individual prizes for all draws to date in the Prize Winners section - some of the calculations were overflowing the maximum size of an integer, so I switched to floating point to cure the problem. Before this fix, it was saying that 8 pounds was the average 3-match prize !

  Added Football Conference and Ryman League teams to my list of Easy Play teams because England's match against Sweden (which England lost 2-1 !) has meant that Conference and Ryman League fixtures will be used for the first time with Easy Play - I now have 156 team names entered that were in the first four fixture lists.

• Wednesday 2nd September
  The chat room was reasonably populated during the live draw, which went fine. I updated the full results before anyone else and they included a lot of Wednesday winners, resulting in the lowest ever prizes for a Wednesday draw to date. Received the latest sales figures fax from Camelot and duly updated the pages.

Previous month: August 1998

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