What's New On These Pages: March 2006

Next month: April 2006

• Thursday 16th March
  Bought two more tickets (online) for Saturday's main Lotto single rollover draw.

• Friday 10th March
  It looks like Euro Millions draws now actually take place at 8.30pm UK time (I'd suspected this for several weeks because when I went to Camelot's site at 9.00pm on recent Fridays, they had the numbers up already!). This accelerated the full results on the Irish official site to around 9.20pm and the full results on the UK site at around 10.20pm or so.

  Unfortunately, there appears to be a currency conversion discrepancy between the unwon jackpot figure in Euros quoted by the Austrian and Irish official sites (the latter only in an irritatingly ignorable tiny scrolling Java applet - yes, the main place in the page where they put the jackpot up still says the pre-draw estimate of 35,000,000 Euros as I type this...grrr - stupid Irish Webmasters have two different jackpot figures on their results page!) as 39,080,313 Euros and the UK official site's sterling figure of £26,351,576.

  So how do I know there's a discrepancy? Well, for every single week since Euro Millions began, you can divide the sterling pounds UK figure by the Euros figure and get back the number of pounds per Euro and this figure is always on a 0.01 pence boundary. Take last week's figures: £18,470,476 / 26,842,720 Euros = 68.81000 pence per Euro.

  Now look at this week's figures: £26,351,573 / 39,080,313 Euros = 67.42928 pence per Euro, which is clearly well away from the 0.01 pence boundary. Also note that the Euro exchange rate would have to drop by 1.38 pence per Euro in the space of 7 days, which is a massive drop rarely seen in any of the previous currency conversions I've done. I phoned Camelot to double-check their pounds sterling figure and they confirmed it for me, so I wondered if there was a typo on the Austrian/Irish side of things.

  So, I suspected that the Euros figure was too high and the easiest typo would be 1m Euros too much, so let's try that calculation instead: £26,351,573 / 38,080,313 Euros = 69.20000 pence per Euro, bang on the 0.01 pence boundary. It also is a more "sensible" rise of 0.39 pence per Euro from last week and not too far from www.xe.net's current exchange rate of 68.9937 pence per Euro either. The only conclusion I can come to is that Austria and Ireland have got it wrong by 1m Euros and the UK figure is correct.

• Thursday 9th March
  Bought four more tickets for Saturday's double rollover main Lotto draw.

• Saturday 4th March
  Bought two more tickets for next Wednesday's rollover main draw (I wonder if I was one of the first in the country to do so online after the rollover had been announced?).

Previous month: February 2006

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