Goody New-shoes

Went shopping for new shoes with Stella today, since my old ones were starting to pinch my little toe. Found some that fit well and that the saleslady liked, too :). They're a bit more square at the front, which will take some getting used to. But I can live with them.

Also spent a fair bit of money on sweets: mostly Belgian chocolates, and some marzipan.

Just ordered pizza for us both—they're usually big enough for us to eat half on one day and half the next, so we know what we're going to eat tomorrow at General Conference already :D

Stella'll be off at around three this afternoon; I'll join her later to watch the Saturday a.m. session of conference at six.

Checks and balances

A question for the American readers of my journal: How do cheques/checks work in the States? (I see HowStuffWorks has an article about this, but it's fairly short.)

From what I hear, cheques are a very frequent method of payment over there, for paying for groceries, paying your credit card bill, paying authors ("The Czech's in the male!"), and so on. But in German, I'm not used to using cheques much; I think they've become even rarer recently now that eurocheques (with a guaranteed balance) don't exist any more.

I would say that most people, if they don't pay cash, use ec cards in shops and direct money transfers (either direct debit or a real transfer) for other things, e.g. ordering things via mail, paying rent, or the like.

Do American checks have to be written out on special forms issued by the bank? Or are there "neutral" forms you can use regardless of which bank you choose?

When you write out a check, what happens to it? I gather that the person receiving it deposits it with his bank, then the piece of paper gets sent to your bank, your bank pays theirs somehow, and you get back the check?

When you receive a check from someone else and deposit it, is your bank account credited with that amount immediately? Or do you have to wait? For how long? Does the length of time depend on whether you're using the same bank as the issuer?

When you deposit a check, do you get cash? Or do you have to deposit it in an account? Or can you do either? Are there different kinds of check for each? (I know that in Germany, there are "Verrechnungsschecks" which can only be deposited, not exchanged for cash, but mostly people turn an ordinary cheque into a Verrechnungsscheck by drawing two diagonal lines across the top left corner and, optionally, writing "Nur zur Verrechnung". Apparently, those are safer especially if they get stolen, because you can tell where the money went since there's a name behind the account.)

I'm especially curious about the "getting it back" part, since I've never heard of that in Germany; I think I'd simply expect to see an amount deducted from my next bank statement. Is the check crossed out or cancelled somehow when you get it back? Can you tell who deposited it, in which bank, or on what date? Can you tell whether a check was never cashed? Does the check get sent to you by postal mail? With your bank statement or separately?

What does "balancing your checkbook" mean? Does it refer to taking the cancelled checks you got sent bank and cross-referencing with the deductions on your bank statement? Or do you keep track of issued checks on a form the bank provides you and you tick them off when the check has been cashed? Or what?

Testing general conference

So I wanted to find out whether I could listen to General Conference audio streams with the software I had installed...

I wandered over to the church's website, found the GC broadcast page, and had a look at "How To Listen". There was a link there that said "Test your media player" (or something like that.)

That brought me to a 404 page; not very confidence-inspiring in the first place. At the bottom, that 404 page said something like "Copyight Yah.com". I wondered what kind of domain that was—Yah sounded like "Yahweh", so I thought, maybe something vaguely religious.

When I went there, it looked like one of those search portals put up by domain-grabbers. Not only that, but it opened up a bunch of popups, at least one of which was on a site called "0190dialer.com" and wanted to download an executable file. Gee, thanks. (FWIW: 0190 is the German telephone number prefix for "premium rate" services.)

I think a link from the church's web site was probably the last place I'd expect to find a Trojan dialer app and a flurry of popups.