What's New On These Pages: January 1998

Next month: February 1998

• Saturday 31st January
  The live commentary and draw updates went fine (we had 5 people drop in at once from an IRC session just before the draw !) and I was fastest to put the full results up as usual.

  BBC teletext page 556 put up the number of jackpot winners and a rounded jackpot prize figure up reasonably quickly (within 15-20 minutes of me putting the full results up), but then twiddled their thumbs until 9.25pm, when they finally put the full results up - a full 45 minutes after I had them up !

  ITV teletext were even worse, amazingly. Although they had the number of jackpot winners and a rounded jackpot prize figure amount (plus, strangely, an exact 5+bonus prize amount and number of 5+bonus winners - if they can give this info exactly for the 5+bonus tier, why not for the jackpot too ?) in their news headlines section at around the same time as BBC teletext (and well after me of course), they didn't even put that on any of the 6 sub-pages they had on page 123 (which is dedicated to the lottery) - I think they simply "forgot" about the full results once they'd got their precious news headlines article up.

  To cap it all off, they still hadn't updated page 123 with the full results by 9.55pm (not even the number of jackpot winners was on that page at that time), which means that these Web pages beat ITV teletext to the full results by over an hour and 15 minutes, which is a new record.

  What irritates me about ITV teletext's performance in particular is that they've been bragging for weeks on page 123 about how they have an "in vision live update" on page 127, which is pointless because ITV annoyingly superimpose the winning numbers right on top the middle of whatever show is airing anyway. There is no choice as to whether you can superimpose the winning numbers on your ITV picture or not - they are forced on their regardless as to what ITV teletext do.

  So they have a live update - fair enough. But what about the full results then ? To neglect their dedicated lottery page (123) for a substantial period of time after they've received the full results and put only a part of the full results into their news headlines (301) section is nothing short of irresponsible. BBC teletext had the full results up at 9.25pm (and now refuse to put anything about the lottery winning numbers/prizes into their news headlines indexed from page 102, which is quite right) - where were ITV teletext's full results then ? The answer, belatedly, was that they put them up around or shortly after 10pm...

• Wednesday 28th January
  There were nine registrants for tonight's live update, which is an all-time record (and, yes, one of the other 8 people beat me to doing the update :-) ). The chat room was also fairly busy and the live commentary and update went fine (though the chat room decided to pause for me just as the numbers were coming out !).

  I beat everyone else to the full results again - teletext was its usual lethargic self (BBC and ITV seem to be using the same [slow] source and didn't update until after 10pm, at least 20 minutes after I did !). Received the latest sales figures fax from Camelot (it actually arrived at work yesterday, but I'd taken a day off) and duly updated the Web pages.

• Saturday 24th January
  It was little quiet in the chat room early on, but a load of people came in towards the end of the TV show and the live commentary and draw went fine. I was at least 15 minutes quicker than BBC and ITV teletext tonight to put up the full results tonight, so they're still a little slower than usual. I've trimmed some of the pairs and triples frequency tables because they were too long.

• Friday 23rd January
  Sent off for my fourth yearly subscription today (104 draws at 2 tickets each = £208).

• Wednesday 21st January
  The live TV show commentary was OK, but because I forgot to turn off auto-page mirroring, the live update on the Web pages was overridden by grabbed Web page info (which had last Saturday's draw info on them of course, since no-one else does a live draw on the Web). I did display the numbers in the Java chat room, so there was a live draw on the site and, of course, the initial generation a couple of minutes later put the winning numbers up, but it was an annoying mistake to make on my part.

  The biggest surprise of the night, though, was the lethargy displayed by both BBC and ITV teletext, who usually get the full results somewhere between 0 and 10 minutes after I do. Tonight, they were an hour later than me, which is the slowest they've ever been compared to me to issue the full results ! I was sent the latest full sales figures fax from Camelot today and duly updated the pages.

• Tuesday 20th January
  Received my ISDN bill - over £350 for the last quarter (thanks to lottery and Liverpool FC site updates, plus awful Christmas TV driving me onto the Net !). Also got a renewal subscription form for another year's worth of subscribed tickets (2 * 104 draws = £208 of course).

• Saturday 17th January
  The live TV show commentary went OK, although the chat room was rather quiet (i.e. empty) until about 5 minutes into the TV show. The live draw was fine, but I spotted another jackpot discrepancy (the typical round-up instead of round-down) on the part of Camelot again, so I've got a call in waiting to see if they can verify their mistake as well.

• Friday 16th January
  Bought another couple of tickets for tomorrow's rollover draw.

• Thursday 15th January
  Received the latest fax (yes, that's two this week) from Camelot and duly added the latest sales figures to the pages.

• Wednesday 14th January
  The chat room was fairly quiet tonight and the TV show commentary and live update were fine. I've adjusted the rollover estimated jackpot formula to ignore any previous rollover sequence involving a Super Draw (there was one in December, which upset the calculations somewhat). This meant an initially incorrect £25m estimate has settled down to a more sensible £13m estimate.

• Tuesday 13th January
  I reported UK Lottery Services to Camelot yesterday and their Web site was shut down today (they were illegally reselling UK lottery tickets and at a big profit too !). Received a fax from Camelot for the first time in 1998, but it only covered stuff I'd phoned up for in the past two weeks :-(

• Saturday 10th January
  The live TV show commentary and update went fine (even if Colin Riddle seems determined to type in the numbers into the Live Updates system faster than I do :-) ), but the results took an age (over an hour - twice as long as usual) to come through. Camelot say they have a new system they are "learning", hence the delay. That's OK for one draw, but it'd better not take as long on Wednesday...

• Thursday 8th January
  Took a day off, so phoned up Camelot for the weekly sales figures (I still haven't had a 1998 fax from them yet...hmmm...) and added them to my pages.

• Wednesday 7th January
  Well, what chaos predictably ensued as I ended up commentating both on Liverpool's quarter-final soccer match against Newcastle United and trying to do the lottery update live. Neither came off well at all - I was in such confusion that I didn't know if I'd even put up the right lottery numbers !

  I mis-typed the number of 4-match winners, but I knew about this because my software flagged it up. I simply didn't have any time to correct it because the Liverpool match went into extra time (and they won 2-0), but I eventually found some breathing space to correct the figure (a simple digit transpose). Should be interesting to see if other sites copy off me for the full results :-)

• Monday 5th January
  Changed the list of grabbed WWW results on Saturday and Wednesday evenings (now include Colin Riddle's Lottery Central and removed Syndication UK [worryingly disappeared !] and Yearling). Adjusted cron jobs so that Wednesday WWW grabs start at 9.00pm, rather than 8.10pm. Got confirmation that Syndication UK have disappeared off the face of the earth - no pages on the Web server and the guy who ran them now has an unobtainable phone number according to his ISP...hmmm....

  Also gone "walkies" are Chris Prickett's site on Simplenet (he stopped updating it in October and there's no Web server responding at the old address now) and even http://www.lottery.culture.gov.uk/ hasn't been available for days now either (looks like a Pipex network break rather than the site being pulled) ! Looks like these UK lottery sites are dropping like nine-pins...

  Annoyingly, Computing Services Department on campus here have pulled their teletext mail service that they'd been running for about 5 years. This means no automatic results from teletext when I'm not available for a live update and no delivery of teletext pages of lottery news to my mailbox each day either. I can't say I'm at all happy about this (I complained about the service withdrawal before Christmas, but got nowhere with my complaint). Anyway, I've updated my docs appropriately (i.e. removed references to teletext).

• Saturday 3rd January
  The first draw of 1998 was a little messy - the live TV show commentary went OK, but the live update system misbehaved somewhat and it took me about 10 minutes to track to the problem down (inbetween which the GIFs weren't generating correctly). Adjusted some variables from ints to doubles to avoid total prize pool overflow for the 3-match category (exceeds MAXINT now).

• Thursday 1st January
  A new year, so I've split the 1997 access stats into a page of their own as usual. Phoned up Camelot for last week's full figures and, after a lot of scrabbling around, they came up with them, so I've updated my pages appropriately. Terrible scratchcard sales over the Christmas period !

Previous month: December 1997

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