What's New On These Pages: August 1999

Next month: September 1999

• Tuesday 31st August
  Phoned up Camelot and asked for their Annual Report to sent to me, which should hopefully arrive by the weekend.

• Saturday 28th August
  The chat room was reasonably busy for tonight's two live draws, which went fine. I was the first to put up the full results and also had the excitement of winning £10 on the lottery (making my total winnings a nicely rounded £150).

• Friday 27th August
  Finally tracked down a fax (dated 20th August - no idea where it had been for the last week...) of Camelot's sales figures and duly added them to my data file, which means only the last two weeks of figures are missing now.

• Wednesday 25th August
  Predictably, the BBC overran the World Athletics Championships (to see another British athlete dismally fail to win gold in the triple jump), so the lottery TV show didn't start until just after 9.00pm BST (five minutes late).

  Conveniently, this meant that there were plenty of visitors waiting in the lottery chat room for the live draw, which went ahead fine (lovely to see a 2 minute lottery - they should all be like that...). I was the fastest to put up the full results as usual.

• Saturday 21st August
  The chat room was surprisingly quiet tonight until just before the main draw - in fact, I did the Thunderball draw completely on my own in the chat room, which is the first time that's happened ! The room was somewhat "invaded" during and after the draw - at least the live TV show commentary and 2 draws went fine. I was the first to put up the full results as usual.

• Thursday 19th August
  Bought two extra tickets for Saturday's rollover draw.

• Wednesday 18th August
  It was very quiet in the chat room tonight - only a few of the "regulars" turned up and even then only for the draw itself. The live TV show commentary and draw went fine and I was the first to put on the full results as usual.

• Saturday 14th August
  It was pretty quiet most of the time in the chat room tonight except just around draw time. The live commentary and draw went well and Camelot even came up with the full results only some 45-50 minutes after the draw, which allowed me to put up the full results before anyone else.

• Thursday 12th August
  Phoned up Camelot again and they corrected the ticket sales figure that they gave me last night (last two digits were transposed) which, in turn, corrected the unwon jackpot prize pool discrepancy that I spotted last night. Bought two more tickets for Saturday's rollover.

• Wednesday 11th August
  Yes, I saw our 90% eclipse up here in Liverpool before you ask - nice, clear sky unlike the total eclipse in Cornwall. There was a reasonable number of people in the chat room tonight to watch the exclusively live TV show Net commentary and draw, which all went well.

  There's a formula discrepancy (even after a double-check of the figures with Camelot) in the unwon jackpot amount that's to be rolled over - Camelot have quoted a figure that's £8 less than my calculations. This error meant I didn't get the time to see if I beat teletext to the full results, but I suspect that I did.

• Saturday 7th August
  It was quiet for a while in the chat room tonight, but people came in about five minutes before the Thunderball draw. No-one to ban for a change tonight and the live commentary and draws went fine. Camelot even had the full results 45 minutes after the draw, which is the quickest since the Thunderball began. I put the full results before anyone else as usual.

• Friday 6th August
  New Web server hardware (50% quicker CPU and the RAM was doubled to 1GB) that hosts this site was installed today - about 45 minutes of downtime was required.

• Wednesday 4th August
  I'd messed up the refresh code by compiling the lottery software after the 7.30pm closure date today, so we got the bizarre sight of no home page updates until after the draw had finished (and then there were refresh tags present for several post-draw minutes until I sorted that out !).

  The lottery chat room, of course, was fine and the live TV show and commentary went ahead as usual, with half a dozen or so people in attendance, plus several turning up after the draw had finished, which is no surprise considering the lack of home page live updates. As usual, a couple of troublemakers turned up and I banned one of them (they have multiple free ISPs, so come back on a few minutes later under a pseudonym).

  I put the full results up before anyone else, even if Camelot took over 10 minutes longer than the BBC to announce the number of jackpot winners.

Previous month: July 1999

© Richard K. Lloyd & Connect Internet Solutions Limited  2024