Historical DRF Consensus data available

[axlq in California]

This is a followup to a thread I started some years ago:
http://groups.google.com/groups12&seekm=8mn9vj%24152%241%40samba.rahul.net#link1

...in which I was seeking historical DRF Consensus data for some
experiments. I am CC-ing this to some people who had expressed
interest (see the URL above if you don't remember).

I've been meaning to make this data available for years. It's
just one month's worth of DRF consensus and race results data from
September to October 2000, but that one month is still a pretty
significant collection (nearly 6,000 races). It's all in one big
Excel spreadsheet, ready for you to analyze and number crunch any
way you want.

This was a way for me to learn the Java programming language, but
I also hoped to develop something profitable with the results.
I wrote a program that downloaded the race schedules, the DRF
consensus, betting info, and race results, automatically every day,
parsed all those web pages, performed error checking to discard bad
horse or race data (DRF pages do contain some errors), and combined
the results in a spreadsheet. Writing the software was a lot of
work (and I haven't used Java since!). I ran this for DRF's 1-month
free trial.

Unbelievable how many races happen in a month. There are 5,780
data rows in the spreadsheet, one for each race. Each row contains:

Date
Track ID
Number of handicappers involved in the consensus scoring
Race number
Length of the race in yards
...plus for each of the top three scoring horses in the consensus:
horse name
consensus score
pole position
morning line odds
win, place, and show payouts

I never managed to do anything useful with it. I offer it to anyone
who might find it useful, and hope that if you do discover something
from this data, that you will share it with me.

You can download the spreadsheet from

http://unicorn.us.com/alex/drfconsensus.zip (430K zipped, 1.7M unzipped)

I hope somebody finds it useful. And before anyone asks, I don't
think I have all the software modules anymore. I've changed
computers 5 times since then. I do have all the original web pages
that the data came from, though.

-Alex