What's New On These Pages: February 1999

Next month: March 1999

• Saturday 27th February
  The BBC revamped its lottery show tonight without any celebrity guest stars, but still outrageously insisted that it ran for 25 minutes. This meant that there wasn't much to say in the chat room during the live show commentary (a man in a duck suit and a piece of grass was as exciting as it got).

  However, because some yes/no stunts were answered by the bonus ball (odd or even) or the lowest ball drawn, the show ran for five minutes after the balls came out, which gave enough time for the BBC to - staggeringly - announce that the jackpot wasn't won and that there'd be a rollover draw on Wednesday.

  This is no mean feat, though one wonders why the BBC couldn't have been announcing the jackpot tier results like this from day one, rather than waiting four years and 3 months (and a total of 331 prior lottery shows) before doing so tonight.

  Of course, this was all too good to be true, because Camelot remained their sluggish self when it came to announcing the full results and took some 35-odd minutes to release them. If Camelot can calculate the jackpot tier in 5 minutes, why does it need another 30 minutes to do the lot ? I put the full results up before anyone else, despite the delay.

• Wednesday 24th February
  I had to report an intermittent network fault to Cable Internet just prior to the draw (their router was misbehaving), but people still got into the chat room to watch my live commentary of the lottery TV show and draw (the last one with Carol Smillie for a while). It went OK, although Camelot were a little slower than I'd have liked to give me the full results (only a matter of minutes, but enough to only tie with the BBC 1 results update).

• Saturday 20th February
  The chat room was fairly quiet tonight and we may have hopefully seen the last of the outrageously long 25-minute Saturday shows for a while. The TV show commentary and draw went fine in the chat room and I was the first to put up the full results.

• Thursday 18th February
  I now additionally remove temporary live update files via the midnight cron job I run on the test and live servers. This will stop the strange behaviour seen by the All Winning Numbers page after the draw has taken place (i.e. it wrongly only allowed you to see the draws that had the machine used in the latest draw).

• Wednesday 17th February
  The chat room was moderately busy for tonight's TV show and commentary, which went OK (with me relaying soccer scores before and afterwards - particularly Everton winning 5-0 !). Camelot gave me the full results at around the same time as the BBC 1 update i.e. about 35 minutes after the draw.

• Saturday 13th February
  The chat room was fairly busy for tonight's TV show and commentary, which proceeded without any problems. Camelot were back to their 30 minutes period for issuing the full results, but I barely beat ITV teletext to the full results (by about one minute) and, of course, beat everyone else to them as well.

• Wednesday 10th February
  The chat room was reasonably busy during the live TV show commentary and draw, which went fine. Camelot then took an hour to release the full results, but since everyone else suffered this double-length delay, I ended up being the first to put up the full results anyway.

• Tuesday 9th February
  Received the latest sales figures fax from Camelot, though this is disappointingly the first one I've had for 4 weeks (it does bring me bang up to date at least).

• Saturday 6th February
  It was a bit quiet in the chat room tonight for the over-long 25 minutes lottery TV show commentary and draw. My TV switched to AV mode as the fifth ball came out, so I typed in the wrong number for it :-( Serves me right for recording Pamela Anderson's new VIP show on Sky One at the same time as the draw. I corrected the numbers pretty quickly though and was, as usual, the first to put the full results up.

• Thursday 4th February
  Resurrected the access stats page (we've switched to Analog 3.1, but I hadn't plugged in the lottery stats because they're generated slightly differently). The 1999-only page currently has 1998 stuff in it, but that should disappear shortly.

• Wednesday 3rd February
  It was moderately busy in the chat room for tonight's TV show commentary and draw. I was quicker than anyone else to put the full results up as usual.

• Monday 1st February
  Updated scratchcard page with a couple of new cards.

Previous month: January 1999

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