I'm doing 42 things
For some reason, when I was first introduced to MP3s, my nice but somewhat misinformed friend told me that it’s better to rename the files and then remove the ID3 tags from the file. Sigh… how wrong we were in our youthful innocence! In the time since, I’ve accumulated rather a large chunk of music, and was just starting to figure out how to program my own tag-fixing thing when I came across the incredible creation that is MusicBrainz . It took a couple days to run through all the files, auto-group them into albums, and tag, rename, and move them appropriately, but was it ever worth it!
hillbert's Life List
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1. Visit 30 countries before I am 30
21 people -
2. become a certified First Responder
2 people -
3. stop biting my nails
7,333 people -
4. give blood 50 times
1 cheer4 people -
5. build an igloo
1 cheer108 people -
6. go on more dates
78 people -
7. List 10 tips from things I have learned the hard way for the next generation
2 cheers12 people -
8. change the world
3,466 people -
9. be in some sort of hall of fame
1 person -
10. Photograph 43 things with the number 43 on them
1 cheer72 people -
11. become bilingual
167 people -
12. Learn circular breathing
40 people -
13. Go faster than the speed of sound
17 people -
14. earn $100 per hour
1 person -
15. understand music theory
21 people -
16. learn chinese
2,610 people -
17. see the northern lights
18,963 people -
18. be less shy when practising other languages
1 person -
19. exercise regularly
1 cheer10,995 people -
20. stand by my atheism but not be condescending about it
1 cheer4 people -
21. teach
1 cheer829 people -
22. Learn to Salsa
2 cheers1,413 people -
23. sleep in a hammock
1 cheer227 people -
24. travel to every continent
1,505 people -
25. Visit every Canadian Province and Territory
2 cheers18 people -
26. Take more pictures
1 cheer15,355 people -
27. Learn Violin
405 people -
28. Join Mensa
286 people -
29. Learn to play the piano
2 cheers8,241 people -
30. juggle 5 items
1 cheer25 people -
31. learn to ride a unicycle
1 cheer295 people -
32. Join a community theater
2 cheers21 people -
33. meet someone with the same name as me
3 cheers8 people -
34. meet more interesting people
49 people -
35. expand my vocabulary
2,739 people -
36. perform standup comedy
119 people -
37. be in a band
1 cheer1,567 people -
38. witness the end of IE
1 cheer681 people -
39. learn to write with my left hand
724 people -
40. learn sign language
8,464 people -
41. be less stubborn
51 people -
42. blog more often
405 people
How I did it
It made me 
How I did it: I went to Europe earlier this year and visited the Vatican. On my way out, I realized that the Vatican is its own country, and hence there is a border with Italy (i.e. Rome). So, I took a minute and stood with one foot in the Vatican, the other on Italian soil. Of course, the security guard looked at me funny... apparently this isn't particularly common. Read how I did it…
Recent entries
Did this back in February at university. We had an unexpected snow day, so I went around the floors in my residence – I’m a Don or RA – and told people to come downstairs and build a snowman. In the end, about fifteen (out of 70) people showed up, and after a little bit of a snowball fight, we put our collective minds together and built ourselves the biggest snowman I’ve ever seen! We had one guy from the Yukon who really knew his stuff. There were also, in the end, five people who had never built a snowman, from wonderful faraway places like Pakistan and Malaysia and Dubai. It was a great feeling getting everyone together and seeing what a bit of fun in the snow could do!
I did this almost entirely by accident—I was planning on baking maybe six dozen cookies to get rid of some excess ingredients. (My apples were going bad; they were apple cinnamon cookies.) Somehow between the recipe on the internet and the kitchen counter, all the quantities got doubled twice! So, of course, I ended up with about a hundred and fifty cookies. Luckily, it was the end of exam season and just before the winter break, so I was able to pawn them off on a whole bunch of friends.
Definitely worth doing, but the story’s much less interesting if it was done deliberately (unless you have a cookie party… that would be fun!)
