Because I stupidly wrote this on Saturday, I found myself being forced into a position where I had to buy a lottery ticket. I know that it's basically a tax on the stupid and I know that the odds of winning a pound are something like ten billion to one. However, because I'd put some numbers up there, I was not going to run the risk that I'd get it right and lose out on millions of pounds - you can almost guarantee that the sure way to make the numbers I'd chosen come up was to not buy a ticket.
In the old days, buying a lottery ticket involved going to a shop, making sure it was a shop that sold lottery tickets (rather than one that sold cheese, pets or "specialist materials"), filling in the slip and paying the shopkeeper a pound. Then you wait for the draw, and win lots of money. Now that we are in a modern age, this is all unnecessary and you can just buy them online, here. And this is what I did.
Several unexpected problems were encountered though. Firstly, the site only seems to work properly with IE and Netscape. It doesn't seem to like Firefox, Camino, Safari or Mozilla. Which is a bit strange, as Netscape is based on Gecko, like the three Mozilla products (I think). I generally refuse to use IE due to it being sh*t (and also not having tabbed browsing), so I've had to download a copy of Netscape (like I really need another browser on my system...) and have used that instead (I did actually use IE yesterday when I bought the ticket, but that just reminded me that it is sh*t).
So once I had a working browser, I get to problem 2. You can't just buy a single ticket, instead you have to credit an account with a minimum of £5, from which you then buy your tickets. I can afford £5, but it was more than I had expected to fork out. After I'd bought my ticket, my account still had £4 in, but I didn't really want to buy any more tickets due to the lottery being the aforementioned tax on the stupid etc... I then spotted that you can also play instant win scratchcard games online. Whooh! I'll soon get rid of my money now. Yes indeed.
First game... based on Monopoly. And I won! I won £1! Clearly the only sensible thing to do then is reinvest the pound in a new game. Which I did and lost it. And the next one too. And the final two earlier this afternoon. So four pounds gone gone gone forever. But what about the actual lottery draw I'd entered?
Predictably I won nothing. Matched one number though (better than I've tended to do in the past!).
Unrelatedly: Last night I won an argument on The Faraway Tree and lost one on The Railway Children. Overall Kids Literature Argumental Rating (KLAR): Neutral.
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2 comments:
I.E deserves to die for it's complete lack of support for immensely useful things such as tabbed browsing, middle-click opening of links in the background and a strange idea called security. And general cr*pness.
However it also implements lots of hacks in web standards (such as html, CSS, Javascript, etc) which makes it a lot easier to write webpages for than other browsers (which then fail to display the pages correctly due to the fact they're written in non-standard versions of html and the rest. For this reason I.E won't die like it ought to. Lazy programmers like writing easy websites that only work properly with IE and are too lazy to properly test them on other browsers.. and therefore sometimes even then implement functions to prevent it displaying in other browsers to so their lazyness and bad coding habits don't show up. MS is under no pressure to make it good... 80% of computer users don't realise there is an alternative, and the rest of us have to endure the fact some websites require us to use IE every so often.
What really makes me laugh however, is the fact my bank (for security reasons) used to refuse to work with anything but I.E. It's only the browser with more security holes than the annual convention of swiss cheese security measures. "we have detected you are using a browser other than Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 or above. For security reasons our internet banking service requires you to use I.E 5 of above" Idiots. (They have fixed this now it seems... perhaps after the recent scare involving popup adds that target IE being used to access online banking)
Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Out of interest, are any of you people still using IE? And if so, why?
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