- Saturday 27th November
Predictably, the chat room was quiet for the first two-thirds
of tonight's excrutiatingly long 55-minute TV show. Things
picked up towards the end and it actually became quite busy -
including a wiseguy who was trying to beat me to displaying
the numbers in the chat room :-) I put the full results up
before anyone else.
- Wednesday 24th November
The lottery show was 20 minutes long tonight (which fooled all
but one user !) and also had to compete with a one-sided
live Chelsea European soccer game on ITV, so expect low
ratings from tonight's TV show. The live commentary and
draw went fine in the chat room and I was the first to put
up the full results.
- Saturday 20th November
What a swizz from the BBC and Camelot tonight ! Not only did
we have to suffer a ludicrously long 55 minute lottery show
(when the two draws take a total of 5 minutes), but the
heavily promoted appearance of the Eurythmics was cancelled,
leaving a surprisingly poor Lightning Seeds to fill in at the
last minute.
Anyway, the live TV show commentary (I only occasionally
commented on it, such was my chagrin at the near-hour-long
show's length) and draws went fine and I put up the full
results quicker than anyone else.
- Friday 19th November
I bought two more tickets for tomorrow's 5th anniversary £20m
Super Draw.
- Wednesday 17th November
I popped into the chat room at half-time in the England-Scotland
match (which Scotland won 1-0, but England scraped through
into the Euro 2000 finals) and did a brief live TV show
commentary and draw. Surprisingly, there were actually
people in there ! Once the virtual lottery had
been drawn, I watched the second half and then put up
the full results just after 10pm.
I informed Camelot and the UK-based hosting ISP of an illegal
UK lottery site, "Play UK Lottery", about what the
UK firm running the site was doing (selling UK lottery
tickets for £4 [instead of the proper price of
£1] and keeping 10% of all winnings over £1,000 !).
The ISP duly shut the site down, which was impressively
quick in response (normally they either ignore me or
say "we need a court order to shut it down").
- Saturday 13th November
The live TV show commentary and draws went well, although
there weren't many people in the chat room (perhaps
BBC 2's live coverage of Ireland's 1-1 draw with Turkey
didn't help, never mind the ludicrously long 50 minutes
of the TV show - it took them 38 minutes to actually
mention anything about the lottery at all !).
I put up the full results up before anyone else, although
I was a bit delayed adding my manual comments because
my Panasonic VCR has decided to chew tapes or, when it
doesn't eat them, play them continuously ! The only
way I could get the tape out was to turn off the power,
turn it on and pump-press the eject button. Roll on
re-recordable DVD is what I say - video tapes, like
cassette tapes, are an absolute pain and really deserve
to die a quick death.
- Wednesday 10th November
The live TV show commentary and draw went fine tonight
and the chat room was reasonably busy during the event.
I put up the full results faster than anyone else.
- Saturday 6th November
The usual suspects were in the chat room and the live
TV show commentary and draw went OK - Dale Winton
effectively made the announcement (later confirmed when
I phoned Camelot) that the Christmas Day draw has
been moved forward to Christmas Eve.
Camelot took an age to get the full results - BBC
teletext (and maybe ITV teletext too) actually beat
them to it. It was about an hour after the draw before
I could get the results up thanks to Camelot's
procrastination.
- Wednesday 3rd November
It was fairly quiet during the draw tonight (competing
against ITV's Chelsea Champions League live soccer match
didn't help much) and the live commentary and draw went
ahead OK. It was actually busy shortly after the draw and
people were still hanging around when I put up the full
results (faster than anyone else).
Picked up a Big Draw 2000 playslip this evening (a bit of
a cramped design with 100 years on a 10 by 10 grid),
but I haven't decided what years to pick and, no, I won't
be telling you what they are when I've picked them either :-)
It's a big decision because it's £5 down the
drain, er, I mean "wisely invested"...
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