title: jQuery Countdown not working with all versions of IE
body: <p>I am using jquery countdown in one of rails project with following code - </p>
  
  <pre><code>var timeoff = new Date("#{time_format(auction.end_time)}");
  $("#myDivId .timerContent").countdown({until : timeoff, onExpiry:applySold, compact : true, layout : '', serverSync: serverTime });
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and serverTime methods has - </p>
  
  <pre><code> function serverTime(){
      $.get("/server_time","", function(data){
        time = new Date(data);
      }, "text");
    return time;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>}</p>
  
  <p>This code works very well with firefox, safari and chrome but doesn't work in IE.
  In IE it renders this - Nan:NaN:NaN</p>
  
  <p>What might be causing this ?</p>
  
  <p>P.S. In above code i at the point of 
          var timeoff = new Date("#{time_format(auction.end_time)}");</p>
  
  <p>i have time format as - "2011-07-07T00:00:00+05:30"</p>
  
  <p>and my Doc type is set as -</p>
  
  <pre><code>    &lt;!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"&gt;
  </code></pre>