What's New On These Pages: October 1998

Next month: November 1998

• Saturday 31st October
  We were re-organising our network today, so there were planned disruptions from 5.00pm onwards, causing a delay in my uploading of the list of today's Easy Play score draws and also a reboot just as the lottery show was starting. Luckily things were back (although somewhat laggy) during the show and my live commentary proceeded, albeit with a chat room lag right as the balls came out :-( The Web page updates were done live though and I had the full results up before anyone else.

• Wednesday 28th October
  It was reasonably busy in the chat room tonight (half a dozen or so people) and they were waiting for me when I entered with just under 10 minutes to go to the TV show [maybe they thought it started at 8.30pm GMT instead of the new time of 8.50pm GMT ? :-) ]. The live TV show commentary (not that there's much of it now) and draw went OK and I put the full results up before anyone else.

• Monday 26th October
  Received a fax from Camelot of the first four weeks of Vernons Easy Play fixtures and typed them in to fill the gap left by the official site's fixtures, making this site the only one on the Net to have the complete set of Vernons Easy Play fixtures (the official site doesn't) ! Bolded Vernons Easy Play score draws in the fixture lists to make them more obvious and this also proved a useful double-check because it will flag up any fixtures that don't match my score draw list (the two are held separately and are now cross-referenced properly). I will start work on generating various stats pages based on the score draws vs. fixture lists shortly.

• Sunday 25th October
  Disabled cron jobs that attempted to grab other site's Web pages. It was pointless because they were always slower than me, plus I've got the Live Updates system that allows other users to submit the winning numbers if I'm not around. Switched timezone variable over (now into GMT).

  I now automatically check the official Easy Play site once a day for a new fixture list appearing and grab that, parsing it for my pages. Strangely enough, the official site doesn't have the fixture lists for the first 4 weeks of Easy Play ! I suspect I'll have to chase Camelot up for those...

  Initially, there's a set of fixture list pages, plus links to those from the Vernons Easy Play results page and each individual Vernons Easy Play page. When I get the full set of fixture lists, then obviously the percentage of draws per team can be calculated (at the moment I only have absolute figures) and, apart from generating an additional draw frequency table in percentage order, I will able to add the "Matchmaker" predictor that the official Vernons Easy Play site currently has.

  This picks out the 11 fixtures where teams have the highest combined percentage of draws, though strictly it should do it on home draws for the home team + away draws for the away team, which I suspect the official "Matchmaker" doesn't do. You also don't want to trust any fixtures involving teams with little data on them (e.g. if either team has appeared in less than 50% of the fixture lists to date, then ignore that fixture entirely). Of course, you'd want a history of how the "Matchmaker" algorithm has done, so you can see how tweaking the formula improves it over time. All irrelevant really because you can't pick your own Vernons Easy Play fixtures anyway :-(

• Saturday 24th October
  The live TV show commentary and draw went OK with about half a dozen people in the chat room. I put the full results up faster than anyone else (including beating the official Easy Play site again - its results service was even "unavailable" for most of the evening !). Easy Play had its first randomly generated score draw, its first abandoned score draw result and "celebrated" the 10th consecutive week of falling sales, which could have been due to the appalling weather we had this week.

• Thursday 22nd October
  Received the latest sales figures fax from Camelot and duly added the figures to my pages. Disappointingly, these only seem to be arriving fortnightly now, plus there's something dubious about the 26th March 1998 unclaimed prizes figure (£274,709, which is about a quarter of its normal value) - it's in brackets in the fax, presumably meaning it's a provisional figure.

• Wednesday 21st October
  I had to restart the chat room just before the (only 10 minutes long) TV show started, so unsurprisingly, there weren't exactly many (2) people in the chat room when the draw took place. The TV show was eerily quiet (no studio audience, which was astounding !) and with no guest star and only a filmed report to suffer, the show whizzed by in no time. I put the full results up faster than anyone else as usual.

• Saturday 17th October
  Today was busy because of the Everton vs. Liverpool soccer match, but I'd finished my live commentary on that before I needed to turn my attention to Easy Play and the main lottery results. Beat the official Vernons Easy Play site to both the set of Vernons Easy Play score draws and the full Vernons Easy Play results by about half an hour each time ! As for the main lottery, the live TV show commentary and draw went fine and I put the full results up before anyone else.

  Vernons launched their full Easy Play Web site today and it has a reasonable set of info, although I'm not keen on the design (bright blue background and they've not made their GIFs transparent). Biggest failure - and the official Camelot Web site suffers from it too - is that they don't put the latest Easy Play result on the home page: it's two levels down on the site !

• Wednesday 14th October
  There were half a dozen people in the chat room to see the live TV show commentary (last Dreamworld show ever hopefully) and draw, though competing against the Maverick movie on ITV and a live Euro 2000 England soccer match on Channel 5 probably meant bad BBC 1 ratings for tonight's lottery TV show. I put the full results up faster than anyone else as usual.

  Had a day off and decided to take a look at the latest ImageMagick (4.1.2) to see if it could be used to create the 7-ball lottery GIFs, but no such luck - there's bugs in it which forced me to carry on running a version that's about 2 years old ! I've reported the bugs to the author in a lot of detail, so hopefully it will get fixed soon.

• Saturday 10th October
  There were a reasonable number of people in the chat room during the live TV show commentary and draw (including one poor guy who having trouble connecting with his Linux box !). I put the full results faster than anyone else, including the dire Easy Play ticket sales, which must have Vernons running around like a headless chicken by now...

  In a particularly anorakish move, my BT "Best Friend" phone number (which gives me a 20% discount) is now 0845 9100 000 and the other Camelot number (0645 100 000) is also in my BT "Friends and Family" scheme (a 10% discount for that). Both numbers are only charged at local call rates, but BT have an outrageous 5p minimum call charge, so I get hit by that when the Camelot phone line drops me or I choose the wrong option on their tone interface.

• Friday 9th October
  After a delay of more than two weeks, Camelot finally faxed me through some sales figures, though the expired prizes figure for the 26th September (only £274,709) looks "provisional" because there's brackets around the figure on the fax.

• Wednesday 7th October
  There were a fair number of people in the chat room for the live TV show commentary and draw (including an ex-Connect colleague !), both of which went well. I put the full results up before anyone else as usual.

• Saturday 3rd October
  The live TV show commentary and draw went fine (had about 6 or 7 in the chat room for the draw) and I put the full results up before everyone else. Perhaps the biggest surprise of the evening was the Vernons Easy Play sales failure - it's now below £1m for the first time and the sales have fallen for every one of the seven weeks following the initial launch. Bad timing, then, for the official Easy Play Web site to be considering launching a new design (due this month according to their current home page), since the game might not survive beyond the New Year unless sales stabilise.

• Thursday 1st October
  Bought two more tickets for Saturday's rollover draw.

Previous month: September 1998

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