EXACTLY. And yet the US public school absolutely required a doctor's note if you miss more than one day of school. If they need 2 to sleep it off, I have to pay to show I had my child examined by a doctor and that they can verify the high fever or flu-symptoms. So I spent $900 for 3 pieces of paper to keep the school from slapping me with truancy charges.

I'm considering a move to the EU for exactly these reasons.

As I understand it my premiums must be after tax, though a portion can be credited. Also my out of pocket expenses are personal funds and I can only write off a portion if it exceeds 7% of my income.

I've been independent for over 4 years now, and for my family of five including my autistic son with a major genetic disorder our insurance started at $400 per month. Catastrophic only, any doctors bills, RX, etc was strictly out of pocket and always hundreds of dollars. I clearly recall one week my three kids caught the same flu and I spent $900 out of pocket for 3 doctors visits.

Every year the rates went up and covered less. I now spend $620/month on a plan without dental, maternity, or vision. I'm spending about $4000 this month on minor dental work (ie: cleanings and a filling!) for myself and my wife, and new glasses for us and one son.

I expect my rates to exceed $700/mo next summer at the rate it's going. I fully expect that should I get injured or require hospitalization my insurance will weasel out, and I'll be bankrupt in 90 days. I feel that I'd get the same value if I just took the money out back and burned it each month.

As a result, I'm looking to emigrate to a first world nation that does have universal coverage. This system is broken and shows no signs of being fixed, Obamacare or not.

I agree that the spirit of adding/removing tags means they should add and remove to the file.

I tried implementing a workflow for scanned receipt management on top of Digikam and got bit by several of the issues we've discussed (ie: using tags for workflow).

I moved off it to other methods, so I'm not current on the capabilities.

I have found multiple inconsistencies in my testing. Warning, I'm on Debian Lenny using Digikam 0.9.4, so these may be fixed in later releases.

Dates: Date handling doesn't update live in the application, I can enter a new date and until I reload the album the changes don't take effect. According to exiftool Digikam is shotgun updating multiple EXIF date fields too, so it has been difficult for me to know which date Digikam honors on first seeing a file (EXIF timestamp, file mod time date, etc).

Tags: You can add a tag and have it stored in the EXIF/IPTC header in the file, but if you remove a tag from the image the removal is performed in the database only.

Comments: Comments are also stored in multiple EXIF locations.

My experience is simply that Digikam was built around owning a central database. The concept of updating the metadata in the files themselves appears to be an incomplete bolt-on feature. OTOH Mapivi only caches data, but I get frustrated with the UI. If you experiment with using exiftool to examine and change file content and compare against what Digikam does, you may discover more holes.

I would really love to find an app which would allow customization of metadata entry, so far I'm using exiftool on the command line to do it in combination with a shell script which prompts for values with history.

I've been searching for the same feature set, a file centric image manager whose metadata is stored exclusively in the file.

One of the best ones I have found is Mapivi:

http://mapivi.sourceforge.net/mapivi.shtml

I still often use Digikam, but its metadata support is inconsistent at best. On the other hand the front end is more useable than Mapivi.

You should also look at ExifTool, because you can manipulate and query metadata with it on the command line.

http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/

If you find a solution, please share!

Add my vote for org-mode!

I run my business off of org, and my wife (a non-techie) writes her fiction in it.

This was on /. a while ago,

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/20/1748243

Gary Taubes book "Good Calories, Bad Calories" looks at the science behind it. Having read it, I'm not surprised the researchers came to their conclusion.

Worth a read.

Do you drink alcohol?

Kudos to the other poster (different thread) that posted "Sugar: The Bitter Truth", its a great watch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

Gary Taubes' book is almost the same regarding high carb diets and related topics like ketosis.

Keep up the fiber in your carb diet, cut out refined anything. Eat all the whole wheat and veggies you want.

Good luck!

You left off several "citation needed" items in that statement, right out of a paragraph labeled "Controversy". One might argue that should be the default state of a human.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketosis#Controversy

I can't say one way or the other on it, but I'm in the middle of Gary Taubes book, "Good Calories, Bad Calories". It isn't as much a diet book as a study on the science of diet. It has been an interesting read, and very disappointing in terms of the junk science and politics involved. I intend to spot check resources when I'm done to verify some of his claims, but feel free to weigh in.

http://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Gary-Taubes/dp/1400040787
http://a.abcnews.com/GMA/NewYearNewYou/story?id=3654291&page=1

I use Ledger (http://wiki.github.com/jwiegley/ledger) and CSV2Ledger (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Flaunchpad.net%2Fcsv2ledger) to import data from my bank, and report on in any variety of means.

Its all text based, which means you can use Version Control and your favorite editor. Ledger even has an Emacs Mode.

Enjoy.

Use Org-mode w/ flyspell inside Emacs.

Org-mode contains a great folding outline organizer which flows with your text, and then you can export to Latex later.

It can also generate TOC, include graphics and tables, and the Latex output is very clean and neat.

I use it for all of my technical documentation, and though the Latex/PDF output would be acceptable, I have a techwriter import an HTML exported version of my document into Word and apply a company template. So native is good, or you can easily adapt it into other systems.

http://www.orgmode.org/

Blue Order rocks the MUD!

I still login on occasion to poke around.