Nolte News

Where can I find those strength shoes?

The envelopes for our Christmas cards got slightly ruined again this year.  Good thing the documentary crew from the hit NBC show “The Office” was there to film what happened.

I was reading a blog post that was only written for the purpose of explaining how to pronounce the author’s name. One of the comments had a great link to a website that gives excellent help on pronouncing names. The site is plainly called Pronounce Names.

I looked up my last name, Nolte, and sure enough it was phonetically spelled very well. It even has an audio widget so that one can listen to it.

The other name that gets butchered a lot is my wife’s: Rachelle. They got it right once again, but no audio recording yet. You can record and submit your own version right through the site if you’d like. I’ll see if I can convince her to do that tonight!

That’s right!  On July 24th, I turned ONE!  (This is how I signal 1).

Mom says I am tall – I am 30.5″ and weigh 22lbs.  I have four teeth, two on the bottom and two on the top.  My mouth is still feeling funny so I also think that I’m getting two more teeth on the top.  I’ve started walking!  I can take at least 5 steps in a row – I even showed everyone at my party on August 1st.  Yup, mom and dad threw me a birthday party.  I had lots of family and friends come to share in my day.  Everything had a cupcake theme, even the cake that mom made.  It was “mmmmm…”.  I also had a little party at daycare right on July 24th.

I like to talk a lots these days.  I can say “up, mom, dad, dog, ruff, and mine”.

Since I am a big girl, I no longer need to drink out of a bottle.  I’ve transitioned to a sippie cup very well.

Here is a link to some of my 1-year pictures.  Enjoy!

Click here to view these pictures or copy and paste this link https://www.searsphotos.com/?shareid=S206927361l5A74WB2HNQ into the address line of your Web browser.

Also, be sure to click on the “pictures” link to see some of our picasa pictures.

A fascinating look into modern Origami.  He actually makes it look easy!

On Thursdays I am allowed to work from home, so I finally had the great idea to put Natalie on some projects.  It’s doubled my productivity!  But I probably will need to find a water (drool) proof keyboard.

Another entertaining and interesting TED talk I liked enough to share:

We got Brewers tickets from my CEO last minute, and holy cow – awesome seats!  Thanks Neil!!!!!

Today at work Randy challenged everyone at lunch to estimate how much change was in his change jar.  For the past decade or so he would throw his spare change into it.  This weekend he’s going to Vegas to do a little gambling and would like to put his collection to “better use.”  But before he turned it all in, we had a little fun trying to estimate its value.

He provided us with the weight that he measured using his bathroom scale (with the typical process of weight of jar and coins minus weight of just jar).  That came to about 29 pounds.  Then he also described how he didn’t really have any bias towards a particular coin, which is to say he hated all coins and just threw everything in. The other key piece of info was that his old roommate sometimes raided his coin jar for quick cash.

So we started by guessing what the distribution was of the coins. Our initial estimates consisted of: pennies 40%, nickles 23%, dimes 20%, and quarters 17%. Then we looked up the weight of each coin in grams and converted the weight of the coins to grams. Our first estimate came to a whopping $269.

Discussing our results, some felt the distribution of nickles was too low. Randy then brought in his bucket of coins and we decided to try a random sample set. So I took a handful and we counted them up. The following chart shows the exact calculations.

Doing the math on the white board caused several math errors to creep in, and so our first estimate came to $243.22, but should have come to what the graph shows: $245.97. In the end our flawed sample set proved to be quite good! After Randy took the change to the bank, the total came to a startling close result of $242.88! A difference of only 34 cents!

If you’re curious and want to do your own calculations, here are the values of the actual distribution which the change machine tallied: 2,543 Pennies, 317 Nickles, 551 Dimes, 562 Quarters, and 6 One Dollar coins. The following chart shows how close our estimates really were to the actual distribution:

Google and Virgin have teamed up create Virgle in order to get a colony on Mars. So get your application in today!

I figured what colony would be complete without a dog…