- Monday 22nd December
I can't make head nor tail of the official site's new
"red text panel" message they have near the top of their
home page. For example, at 11.30pm tonight it said
"Lotto & Daily Play are temporarily unavailable. Why not try our
exciting Instant Win Games?". Now does that mean "you can't
play Lotto and Daily Play until terminals/online purchasing
opens at 6.00am tomorrow morning" or does it mean "we've got
a technical problem with those 2 games"?
It could be the latter I guess because, yep, by 11.30pm, there
was no sign of Monday evening's Daily Play winning numbers or
full results, both of which are usually available by 9.00pm.
Unfortunately, I didn't spot this until after 11.00pm (complacency
cos my auto-grabbing's been working smoothly for many weeks now),
so I couldn't phone Camelot to ask what's going on. However, BBC teletext
page 555 seemed happy enough to put up the winning numbers and prize tier
info, so that's what I put up initially.
- Saturday 20th December
Coded a new Daily Play page that shows the longest free Lucky Dip
(0-match) sequences, because I was curious just how many free tickets
in a row you could possibly win if you kept playing the same ticket
over and over (still means you'd probably have to spend as much as
you got in free tickets of course, but what the heck). Was coded
to the CD auto-repeating of "What I Like About You" by Madonna's recent
signings, Lillix (and why hasn't the CD I have been released in the UK
yet?!).
Added the three latest semi-precious machines to the Live Updates pages
(so there's 6 in the Machine pop-up menu now).
- Friday 19th December
It looks like Camelot have switched the Daily Play machines to the
semi-precious stone ones, which fooled my auto-grabber last night (it
wrongly put "G" as the machine letter [Guinevere] in my results data
file, when it should have been "R" [Garnet]). I've fixed both the data
file and the code for future Daily Play draws.
Corrected the number of machines used for the games in my code to be 13
(was incorrectly set to 11, which was the total only after we knew about
Topaz, but before Garnet and Pearl were revealed). Fixed bad indentation of
10th ticket in the second table on the Best Performing Daily Play tickets
page.
- Thursday 18th December
Corrected the 1+Thunderball winners figure after phoning Camelot today.
Noticed that their official site (outside of draw nights) now lets
you buy lottery tickets online, although they are still blocking
Linux users - arrrgh ! Fixed minor draw name bug in the Change The Draw
Range page of the Ticket Checker (was incorrectly saying "Daily Play" when
it should have just been the main draw).
- Wednesday 17th December
Because I only visit the official site home page twice a
week (Wednesday and Saturday), it took until tonight to
notice that their home page has been revamped somewhat (the
rest of the site has remained the same), but they still
haven't raised the prominence of tonight's main Lotto
winning numbers, which are stuck in the bottom left of the
home page for some reason.
It could be that the revamp slowed down last Saturday's
updates, but there's really no excuse for tonight's results
being so sluggish. Whilst the Daily Play was all done and
dusted just before 9.00pm, it took around 2 hours again
to put up the winning numbers for the other draws
and almost another 30 minutes after that (yes, after the
Camelot phone line closed !) to put up the full results.
To make matters even worse, I have a discrepancy in the
number of 1+Thunderball winners for tonight's draw - I have it written
down as 52,350 (transcribed from a woman on the Camelot phone line
who was quite careful with her annunciation), but the official site
is now saying 52,550. Frustratingly, I can't phone Camelot now until
Thursday morning to find out the correct figure !
- Tuesday 16th December
Bought two additional tickets for tomorrow's rollover draw.
- Saturday 13th December
It looked like the content management team behind Camelot's
official lottery site fell asleep at the keyboard tonight -
it took them some 2 hours to put up the winning numbers and
something like 3.5 hours (I'm not kidding !) to display the
full results (prizes/winners). I phoned up Camelot at
around 9.15pm and got the info from their phone line, so
it's not that Camelot internally didn't have the info - it
was just the Web maintainers who were asleep at the wheel.
- Tuesday 9th December
Bought four additional tickets for tomorrow's rollover.
- Friday 5th December
Bought two additional tickets for tomorrow's rollover, plus also spent
£5 on an overpriced Christmas Millionaire Maker ticket. Added a
ticket history link for each jackpot ticket in the Daily Play
Trivia Analysis page.
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