I’ve started to buy Lotto tickets online, because it’s so quick and easy. I got an email from them this morning:
We have some exciting news about the ticket that you bought for the Saturday 26 November draw. Please Sign In to your Account at the National Lottery website for more details.
My heart nearly stopped! I recently won £500 in a prize draw at work, so I was imagining what it would be like to have won something twice in one month - and just in time for Xmas too!
After logging in, it turns out I only won £5 on the Thunderball draw. Ah well, better than nothing, but I really thought it might have been a lot more!
I stumbled on this Reading travel info website (I can’t actually remember how - so many links, so many clicks…). Leaving aside for a moment the fact that the site looks like it was designed in a single sitting by a colourblind 4 year old, there is actually some useful content on there.
Because of the appalling site design, it’s actually not possible for me to say with any certainty whether these links will actually work, if not you can get to them all yourself from the main page. Oh, and it seems to be very fussy about browsers, I couldn’t get it to display properly in Firefox and had to resort to using IE (but I’m OK now).
- This link should take you to the Trafficam Reading page, which has a map of web-enabled traffic cameras around Reading town centre. They’re updated every 5 minutes and whilst it’s a shame they’re not live action, they should give you an idea of current traffic congestion. Click on the purple camera icons, currently they are all working except for one.
- There’s another webcam page for the M4 motorway cameras between junctions 5 and 13.
- There’s a page showing town centre car park information. Interestingly, it has a facility for forecasting car park usage at a given date / time in the future. As an experiment, I asked for figures for midday on 23rd Dec and it told me there were close to 2,000 spaces available. I’m highly sceptical about that, to say the least!
- Perhaps more importantly, there’s also a document explaining the current proposal for knocking down the flyover near the Oracle and making the IDR a one-way traffic system - Horizons: The future of the IDR [pdf]. If you’re quick, there’s still time to get yourself along to one of the public consultations. The last one will be held in Reading Town Hall on this Friday 25th Nov, 10:00 - 19:00. I might take a wander down there myself.
Tags: transport announcements Reading travel
Edit: It seems the same webcams are available on the BBC Berks website.