Coke to hit streets again; Shop Smart, shop Alabama

In a rare move, I have bothered looking at our local newspaper, to discover two very interesting stories:

1. The Teamsters strike at the area Coca Cola bottler has ended after three weeks, so residents of four Alabama counties and six Mississippi counties can look forward to guzzling Coke products again. This is good news as the hoarding and battling over soft drinks in grocery store aisles was getting serious.

2. In other Alabama news, a back to school sales tax holiday in effect this weekend, from Aug 1 through August 3. The state has suspended its sales tax and some 250 cities have suspended the local sales taxes. Items included are clothing under $100, books and textbooks under $30 and $50, and computers under $750. Mississippi doesn’t have a sales tax holiday, so you can bet retailers in  MS counties near AL are feeling the crunch in lower sales this weekend.  (IOW, personally speaking, ”Ouch! My wallet is feeling thin this weekend!”)

You wanted desperately to know these things, didn’t you? Now you can sleep at night.

Yo, Sitemeter! Crash IE Will Ya? PHHHPT!!

In case you haven’t heard or have run into this little problem but haven’t figured out the source, sitemeter dot com has some java code that is blocking IE from opening pages that use their service. Which is a lot of blogs, I have discovered. 

I determined the source of the problem when my computer got the soon to be infamous “Can’t open. Abort” message the old fashion way. I went to a couple of offending sites and read what my status bar said when the computer froze. I’ve had paypal links lock up webpages, too, btw.

One of many reports about the problem is here.

The current solution is simply to take sitemeter off your page, as suggested here.

Have a golden raspberry award, sitemeter guys. Way to go.

UPDATE: 10:20 am CST 8-2-08

Someone has done something. The sitemeter blogs are available again, with sitemeter logos still on the pages. Sitemeter’s home page is still aborting out, though. Are people switching to the html version, perhaps? More likely sitemeter has patched a fix.

UPDATE II: 12:20 pm CST 8-2-08

Ah ha! Mutual blame to go around! Seems there is a longstanding glitch in IE that the Sitemeter folks forgot to factor into their latest upgrade. More info can be found here