Site: 2005 Itemized Deductions
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Yesterday, Nadine, my little friend’s niece ran to me and showed me that her science teacher taught them that carpet is recyclable.

– No it can not be recycled, I replied mindlessly . It might be possible to reuse it, but surely impossible to recycle it.

As she was keeping on arguing with me and even told me that carpet recyclers had their own organization in U.S.A.. I decided to go on Google and searched it out. Well, the little girl was amazingly right. There is really an organisation of carpet recyclers in the US. Also there was even a construction waste recycler in my area that handle such items. I found about Recyconstruction and Recymobililer in my neighborhood : they provide recycling services for every  furniture, appliances, electronic equipment and construction debris. I talked to an environment specialist, Andre, and he explained to me about all the things that are recyclable as of today.

– Carpet is taken for its plastic content, it could either end up as a new carpet or something else made with plastic.
– Wood waste are sent to an electric producer, they use wood to generate power. Their process is a smoke less fermentation that do not impact global warming.
– Sheetrock are going through some machines and transformed into powder, pulp and paint are removed, and the gypsum will either serve as fertilizer or be used to build new gypsum drywall.

And it goes on and on for each variety of m...
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I suspect that when most of you are planning your vacation to Walt Disney World, Tom Sawyer Island isn’t high on your “must see” list. More likely, you’re thinking about which resort to stay at, where to eat, character meet-and-greets, and possibly a ride on Space Mountain and Kilimanjaro Safaris. But you probably won’t even think about Tom Sawyer Island until you’re in Frontierland and you see one of the rafts transiting the Rivers of America. And that’s okay; because Tom Sawyer Island doesn’t require any advance planning. It only requires a willingness to experience a low-tech adventure that pays homage to a vanishing part of the American landscape.

Many people think that Tom Sawyer Island was an opening day attraction. But that’s not the case. This section of Frontierland didn’t open to the public until May 20, 1973. At that time it took a “D” coupon to ride the rafts to the island. Here are three pictures taken of the island, or should I say landfill, in January 1972. The first picture was taken in Frontierland, somewhat in front of Country Bear Jamboree, looking at the south tip of the island. Harper’s Mill now sits on this spot.

This next picture was taken from the Haunted Mansion. As you can see, there was nothing on the island except scrub brush.

This last picture was taken from the Walt Disney World Railroa...
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For a long time, I worked on the NLS Team.

MSDN might claim that NLS stood for National Language Support.

But given how often people take NLS in the direction I mentioned in You work in NLS? How many languages do you speak?, which inspires me to take Cathy's answer and say it really stands for Not Localization, Stupid. :-)

Because people assume that I must be in localization if I do international support.

Now of course it has been many years since I worked on the NLS team, and the NLS team as such is no more. I am on the World-Readiness Team.

Ironically, our reporting structure is such that we report up through the same part of the Windows/Windows Live organization that handles (among other things) localization, so although I am still not a localizer I do work on a team that handles things like localizability and in some sense am on the llocalization team, now.

Kind of a very roundabout application of the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em!" philosophy, though one has to play fast and loose with the definition of 'em to make it work, and refer to two different groups of people in the two 'em instances.

Now all along, one of the most central issues that comes up when one is looking at ...
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Biography

Roderick P. McDonald was born in Sydney, Australia, on April 16, 1928, and received all of his formal education there, completing a PhD at the University of New England in Northern New South Wales in 1963. Subsequently, he had academic positions at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, Macquarie University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He retired back to Sydney in 2004, retaining emeritus status at the University of Illinois and at Macquarie University, Sydney. Dr. McDonald served as president of the Psychometric Society and the Society for Multivariate Experimental Psychology. In 1990, he received an earned doctor of science degree for his work on psychometric theory. In 2001, he received the Sells Career Award. He is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and the Royal Statistical Society. His work in multivariate analysis has been widely influential. A Festschrift in his honor was recently published (Maydeu-Olivares & McArdle, 2005).

Interviewer: Perhaps before we begin with your professional life you could provide a few biographical details. How did your parents come to be in Australia? Siblings? Childr...
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