Sounds like a variation of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" to me...or at least, shares similar elements of the melody, in addition to also being in a minor key.

The best part is this (and the other stories on that link) are available in multiple, non-DRM formats. I'm 10x more likely to give a story a chance if I can transmute it to a medium that works for me (e.g. my Rocket eBook reader or my Sony Clie). Not everyone wants to sit at their computer and read a copy-protected .pdf document (like some publishers seem to think a "free" version should be). Hurrah to Night Shade Books for this train of thought!

Oh yeah, and Blind Shrike (er, I mean Butcher Bird) rocks. Definitely check it out if you haven't yet.

Obviously, checking your credit card receipts against the charged amount is the most important thing. But if you're using this or any other method to do a quick scan of your charges to see if there's any meddling, you should make sure the method you're using 1) allows you to make a quick scan and 2) allows you to verify that there's no meddling that occurred.

1) If you're having to add up the dollar digits and then compare to the cents digit, how quickly does this actually work for you as a scanning mechanism? Also, what if you have a meal that ends up being $48 after tip? Do you make the last cents digit a 2 (ignoring the fact that the sum is actually 12), make the last digit of the cents a 3 (summing the numbers again until you get a single digit number), or other?

2) If you're rounding to a dollar figure so you can see if someone meddled with your account because it doesn't end in .00 or .25, are you also aware of what your dollar amount was? Can you be sure in a quick scan that $60.00 is not correct and it was actually $50.00?

I think the palindrome solution is cool, as long as you have an easy means of figuring it out, and aren't worried about the waitstaff creating a higher-value palindrome. Combining this with a hard-to-modify number printing scheme seems like the best bet for a quick-scan tool and one that won't be messed with after you sign the check.