DSB Bank tumbling or not?

First of all, I'm not big on economics so don't shoot me too hard if I'm off now and then..

About 3 years ago a bank filed for bankrupcy (this word seems thé perfect word at the moment), before that it was 24-25 years ago since a bank tumbled. Last year saw our government spend billions on banks to keep them running. I got all of my accounts with the ABN Amro which got taken over for if I'm not mistaken 51%. It's of course debatable if a country should invest so much in banks to keep them upright.

But yesterday the definite news came that the DSB Bank was in really big trouble and might have to file for bankrupcy. As we speak there are curators who are looking at possible ways to save the bank (and more important the money of its clients). The Dutch (and probably some other) customers already picked up a couple of hundred million euro's to put into accounts in other banks. The state declared that they would ensure any amount of money of the clients upto 100 000€. So for the little man there shouldn't be too many problems untill house-sales come into the picture.

But I just received a mail from my employment agency that if you called in today before 5pm (and only today!), you could change the account into which they pay your salary if you are a DSB client. That's a hard service.

There are two sides to this.
1) The trust in the states promise to guarantee your money upto 100K € seems to (if still possible) tumble even further. The fact that the agency mailed this enhances the distrust so even if people didn't transfer all of their money, they'll feel supported to do so now (even if they are far below the guaranteed amount) and if nothing else, if able, change their salary account. I hope for the people who have more than 100K in the bank that DSB comes up with a plan to be able to support itself and at least save its customers from MAJOR money loss.

2) As said before it's a hard service. A hard service, but in a time where jobs are sometimes hard to find and you really want to be sure of your income as well as you can, it's a writing on the wall that the agency does nót trust the government to be able to save all banks, let alone the DSB and the agency wants the best for its clients. The least it has done by this mail is to keep the trust of its 'employees'.

Has anything like this happened in your country or are you expecting it? People weren't expecting it here, that's for sure!

I'm sooooo retro

It's a public secret I don't have an Ipod, I use some ancient device called an mp3-cdplayer to listen to my music while on the road. It's still working after 8 years and I'm not planning to replace it anytime soon (as long as it's still working of course).

Everytime someone sees me pull this one:

out of my pocket they're like WHAT THE F is that! But I like being able to just grab a normal cd or an mp3 cd out of a rack and press play, instead of hooking a machine up to the pc and having to erase-copy stuff and fix playlists and whatnot, and I'm not getting started about being forced to use itunes. I'm just lazy like that.

Another advantage is that I just use rechargable batteries and I always have an extra set with me so that I'm not stuck without music.

But what I was building up to was that about a month (or is it already 1,5?) ago I bought an LP player, brand new but it still has a retro feel to it buying a new thing to play old music. My parents got a ton of lp's that they want to put on cd, and I would just like to play them as lp's.
I'm really looking forward to be able to play Peter and the wolf or some other oldies again:

It's at least 10 years since I've heard this one!

Next to that, last week I bought 2 LP's. One with the best of Ennio Morricone and BÖC's Imaginos:

I'm really eager to play those.
But somehow I can't get my lp player to work. I only have an old miniset radio with an aux function on it but the LP player has the option of using a line-in connection instead of the phono. And besides that I couldn't get the thing to at least start turning which you would expect even if the music signal couldn't be transferred if it's plugged into current. I hope I'll be able to solve this and listen to old music again before long.

Of course the 'I'm soooo retro' is in jest, I just like the fact that my mp3 player still works and I really love to be able to play those old lps again.