Fetch’s Blog

Back From Enlightened Warrior And Millionaire School

October 10th, 2006

Michelle and I attended the Enlightened Warrior Training Camp (here in EWTC, since it’s less to type) September 10th through
the 14th. I then attended Millionaire School (MMS) with my dad last week. Both Peak Potentials trainings were great, but
it’s good to be home for a while too, with some time to implement all I’ve learned in the last few months.

Enlightened Warrior Training Camp

EWTC showed me how it feels to perform at a pace, and with more intensity, than I can rarely recall in my life. I realized
that I have worked very hard to stay comfortable and “safe” in my life - although this sense of safety is only an illusion of
security (like how taking our shoes off at the airport makes us all more secure). I have let my amount of control (or lack
there of) of a situation, and desire for knowledge of what is to come and exactly how it will be, to dictate what I get
involved with; to get in the way of having fun and succeeding big time.

EWTC is a great opportunity for me to experience on a physical level
(through all of the activities we did) the power that is me, and those who will stand with me. I have gotten a lot out of my
other seminars, but the physical component of EWTC really helps to drive it home. Once you feel what it is like to play full
out; give your one hundred percent, you won’t want anything else. Thank you EWTC for helping me to raise my bar.

Ivan Fetch (Cunning Tiger)

Millionaire School

Millionaire School (MMS) exposed me to a lot of different vehicles to making my money work for me, and some for passive income
as well. Peak Potentials has another (unveiled next year I believe) training which is geared only toward passive income, and
MMS will strictly become a “make your money work for you” training.

Stocks and options are less mysterious (although I still
have plenty to learn), and real estate is an even more exciting prospect than it was before. I like what one of the
presenters, Greg H, said about real estate - “real estate isn’t easy, but it’s simple.”

I really really enjoyed getting to spend time with my dad - we had a lot of good conversations about real estate,
memories of fun times passed, where we
want to move in our lives (short term goals), emotional vs. intelligence when making business decisions, and plenty of fart
jokes and stuff too. Dad, it is good continuing to get to know you, learn with you, and spend time with you!

Lisa, who attended EWTC, was also at MMS. Lisa, it was good seeing you again and getting to know more about you and your life.

OK, I’m off to look for entrepreneur clubs / organizations in the Denver area…

Posted in Traveling, Self Improvement, Good Friends/Family, Harv Eker and Peak Potentials | Comments Off

It’s Alive… The Blog Lives

September 8th, 2006

Yes, the blog and I are still alive and kickin’. I thought I’d do a little catch up post; I’m back in the mood to blog
things lately…

Philosophical Stuff

Life is good - when I look back over the last year, it seems like two or three years in terms of the changes and success I’ve
realized. I am a lot more clear on what I want (and do not want) in my life. A lot of things feel simpler than they once
were - a lot of sitting and stewing about a thing has been replaced with a much quicker thought process and then taking action
toward the resolution of that thing. I believe even more in “it will be OK just because I will make it that way, and the
universe and others will help me” (not to be confused with being totally passive and doing nothing and expecting good things
to fall out of the sky and hit you on the head).

Music

IN July I put Jumpstart This (4.5 Mb mp3)
on my music page. I used
Quick Windows Sequencer (QWS) instead of my (showing it’s age) Power Tracks sequencer. QWS is a really
nice sequencer, and for free too!

I was introduced to QWS by Andre Louis, who created a nice
QWS demo (29 Mb Ogg Vorbis). Incidentally Andre is a dam good
keyboard player - you can check out a lot of his stuff on his site (linked above), including his tbrn.net radio show, streamed
Saturdays at 5:00 Pm EST.

Something else which Andre brought to my attention is NINJAM (Novel
Intervallic Network Jamming Architecture for Music), allowing you to jam with others over the Internet. Visit the site to
read more about how it handles network latency. I have jammed with a few folks on the public NINJAM servers - so it does work
and is pretty neat - but haven’t coordinated with Andre to jam yet.

A Good Friend Back In Town

Claudio spent three months here in 2005, as a visiting professor with the Computer Science department. As Claudio is a good
friend of Mario’s, and he needed a place to stay (the decision was a bit more complicated than this, but…) he rented out our
basement and we had the pleasure of getting to know him. We knew Claudio was returning, this time for six months, but
couldn’t quite remember the exact date. He wouldn’t be able to stay with us this time as Michelle, the kids, and I are living
together again (as of 12/05) but we
will definitely get to spend time with him.

One day a few weeks ago, my door bell rings and it’s Claudio and his girlfriend (whom he met last year, and may still want to
remain nameless?). What an excellent surprise - totally unexpected!

It’s great to have Claudio back here, to get to know his girlfriend better, and to do some of the things we didn’t make time
for last year, like listening to more live jazz, going up to the mountains for some grilling, and getting philosophical into
the small hours of the morning.

The Family

Rhianna is eight years old, and Ashlyn is ten - they continue to develop their own preferences and opinions, and make
interesting (still “kid innocent”) observations. Sometimes the observations are micro enough that it creates a kind of
information overload in my brain (E.G. I was going to walk down the left side of the stairs, but then I decided to walk down
the right side because…), but other times their outlook reminds me of how adult perspectives can become narrowed and
confining. It’s those times when I’m reminded of an openness which I’m overlooking, that are particularly great.

Michelle and I are back into a communicating and feeling (in this case I am referring to emotional feelings, pervert people)
existence again after her busy time leaving Computer Science, and my corresponding pull-away to pseudo protect myself from
continuing to reach out when nobody was home. When we make time to communicate, stay honest, and “tell the truth faster”
(from Canfield’s Success Principles) what we have is awesome.

Zeke is eleven, and still thinks and acts like a puppy for the most part.
He just had his teeth cleaned, a couple of them removed (rotting roots will do that), and a growth removed from his side.
The growth turned out to be benign, which is great. I’ve been thinking a bit more about his mortality lately (given the vet
visits and conversations about his health). I am glad that he is in good health, and continues to be such a great member of
our family. His personality, ways of communicating, and how he shows his caring for us are things I appreciate a lot more.

We’ve got some pictures I want to post online (camping last weekend, kids’ first day of school, the Breakthrough To Success seminar) but I need to shrink them down from 1 Mb files and label them. I’ve been thinking about using Gallery to help manage the photo library on the home server, and/or put photos online for (public consumption. Gallery looks pretty nice from what I’ve looked at on their site, and it’s in PHP too.

Seminars / Conferences

We attended Jack Canfield’s Breakthrough TO Success this past August - essentially the same seminar from August of 2005,
but this year was equally as valuable as last year. We got to attend this year’s seminar as part of the
advanced
seminar we purchased.

One testament to jack and his staff, is that I was still just as excited and riveted by the opening remarks,
even though they were all things I’d heard before. The effort to make new and returning participants equally welcome is
impressive. I was reminded of my progress over the last year by how the seminar felt so much more alive and enjoyable the
second time through. IF anyone out there has still been pondering attending Breakthrough To Success, definitely do it! IF
money is
your hangup, call Self Esteem Seminars / Chicken Soup for the Soul Enterprises and talk with them - they are very friendly and
accommodating folks.

Very soon I’ll be attending T. Harv Eker’s Enlightened
Warrior, and then Millionaire School.

We’re excited to see what kinds of things Enlightened Warrior will bring; we know it has an outdoor (hiking Etc?) component,
and the comments about it from other participants are astounding. I can’t wait for more tools to sluf off more of the
unnecessary constraints I place on myself. For more of an idea on what this camp is about, check out this Enlightened Warrior letter.
We’re going to New York for the seminar - north of New York City, about one and a half hours on route 209, set in the Upper Hudson
River Valley and the Catskills mountains.

Millionaire School is in October, in Orlando Florida. My dad will be attending Millionaire School too - it’ll be good to
spend some time with him and learn more about real estate
and investing together. He and Mary are doing well in real estate, so I’m curious to mix his experience and opinions
with those from the seminar. We’re meeting a couple of days before the seminar to
hang around, get caught up, and just enjoy doing what ever the hell strikes us.

I’ve also been taking part in T. Harv Eker’s coaching program. Although the sessions are a little shorter (25 minutes) than
I’d thought (50 minutes) that motivates me to put in more time and effort in between calls, and play full out during calls. I
of course get out what I put
into the experience, but my coach helps by giving an extra push at the right times, being supportive, offering suggestions
from her experiences, and keeping things humorous from her end too.

OK, that’s my catch up for now - until next time (it won’t be three months, I promise)…

Posted in Death, Self Improvement, Jack Canfield, Good Friends/Family, Music, Mishmash, Harv Eker and Peak Potentials | No Comments »

The Millionaire Mind Intensive

June 7th, 2006

This weekend we attended the Millionaire Mind Intensive (MMI) seminar. This is the first time T. Harv Eker and Peak Potentials has held seminars in the Denver area. The seminar used high-impact processes, experiential exercises and high-energy, accelerated learning technologies - basically repeating key phrases verbally, reviewing the previous day’s material in the seminar (briefly), dancing to music to keep our energy up and our body moving, and using brief meditation and a series of exercises, to turn our mind into a millionaire mind; turn our thoughts into ones which support us and what we want, instead of the notions we hold from the things we were told, taught, and modeled growing up.

The seminar was free, and if you purchase the Secrets of the Millionaire Mind book, you can get two free tickets to the next MMI seminar. The seminar comes to Denver again this December.

The seminar contained sales pitches for Peak Potentials’ other seminars - a small price to pay for such a beneficial, free seminar. After all, some of the pitches appealed - we’ll be attending (at least) three more conferences held by Peak Potentials - we signed up for Millionaire School (wealth building and passive income vehicles), Enlightened Warrior (practice confidence, realize your true power), and Life Directions included as a bonus (express who you are and why you are here)

I also signed up for the Success Tracs coaching program, as one more way to help keep me on my track. I’m excited about the coaching program as another resource which is where I want to be - minds I can tap, more people I can ask questions along my road. One condition I am putting on myself (not that the coaching program won’t be pushing me too) is that I can not ask a question without action. IN other words, action must be hand-in-hand with the talk (as talk by itself is cheap).

Here are some of the insights I took away from the seminar which have really stuck with me

“The only thing that can mess up the money management outlined in the book and the seminar, is your better idea.” SO true - As Harv and Doug (our other trainer) say, manage my money (taking various percentages out of my income for investment, giving to others, long term savings for spending, Etc) as a mechanical process. IT doesn’t require thought or analyzing, it just requires that I do it.
When I face fear and forage ahead to the next step of a journey, it feels exhilarating. I recognize the success, which in tern breads more success, and I feel on top of my world. I’ve realized this over the past few months, but it was reiterated to me in one of the exercises. There were plenty of reasons to give in to the fear (which seemed very real - doesn’t it always?), but facing the fear and continuing was awesome.
My fears can really run away with themselves. They are pretty talented at painting potential gloom-and-doom scenarios. If I allow this fear to limit me, and allow the negativity and doubts of others to stop me, getting what I want in life is going to be a hell of a lot more difficult. There is a difference between this kind of fear, and the “wo, a bus is about to run me over” kind of fear. I have to trust that my instincts will kick in for the latter.
I’ve allowed past events and the opinions and comments of others to keep me in a pseudo comfortable, limiting financial state. I’ve locked myself into a stagnant financial life with guilt, unnecessary justification of myself to others, and fear of losing the money I have. The solution to this is amazingly easy - re-frame the unsupportive thoughts into supportive ones, manage my money, and seek approval only from myself.
Stepping outside of my comfort zone is …. uncomfortable, but it feels better than being bored, and the ways in which I grow are fun and enlightening.
Things only have the meaning I give them. Things are only complicated if I make them so. Continue to be bigger than my problems (instead of a problem being bigger than me, thereby making it a problem). Remembering these simple yet powerful nuggets can really simplify a lot.

There’s no reason not to go to a free seminar which is so great. DO it!

Posted in Self Improvement, Harv Eker and Peak Potentials | 4 Comments »

More On Being Atached To Nothing and Open To Everything

May 25th, 2006

A friend of mine mentioned that my recent post on Being Attached To Nothing and Open To Everything didn’t
make sense, so I thought I’d elaborate a bit:

The disassociation with identities is not a right here, right now, removal of those parts of me, it is
instead an awareness that those parts are detachable. It declares a willingness to disassociate from one
or more of the parts in order to move upward in my life.

One analogy is that someone may have had long hair all of their life. It may have crossed their mind on
occasion that they could cut their hair shorter, but they (perhaps without even consciously realizing it)
rejected this possibility because who they are, is someone with long hair; long hair is one of the
properties of their being. In my previous post, I’m talking about my further realization that (to keep
with the analogy) long hair is something that I have, but it is not what I am; it does not define me. I
would still be myself with shorter hair.

OF course this concept can be scaled to things much less obvious and physical than hair - that’s what’s
exciting about it.

Posted in Deep Thoughts, Self Improvement | 1 Comment »

Being Atached To Nothing and Open To Everything

May 23rd, 2006

I’ve found a common thread which is very exciting - Wayne Dyer puts it as being
open to everything and attached to nothing. In my pursuit of uncovering what I
want, and broadcasting those intentions to manifest my desires, I will
disassociate from my identities (being ahead of the group, knower of computer /
technical things, always certain), what I’ve been told (save money, always be
prepared, priorities should be …..), and ideas who’s time have passed and could
use a spring re-evaluation.

It is time for me to reprogram my mind for the conscious and sub-conscious
thoughts which support the results I desire. I have been thinking about and discussing
this raw (unformatted, new, somewhat scary) recent clarity with Michelle over the
past few days. Writing it here is a further commitment to myself to living the
existence that I want, especially when my journey is uncharted, and cheer leaders
are replaced with lions.

This feels very freeing - like turning a restricted, boxed in, narrowed view,
inside out, and suddenly getting clear, wide open, sun lit infinity. I got a
glimpse of “all that is possible…” back in August (Canfield Breakthrough To
Success), and I experienced more openness in February (Advanced Breakthrough TO
Success seminar), but I allowed those moments to slip away; they were like
little animals briefly, excitedly peaking their heads out, and then
sneakily disappearing
into their labyrinth. My recent advancement to the next rung of my ladder is
particularly cool because I did it. I reopened my mind enough to
ratchet myself up another notch - how fun.

So what will I do now!? I will focus on my thoughts and consciousness, in order to
populate my sub-consciousness with only things which support me and what I want. I
will create positive habits for myself.

I have read and heard about this a lot since August, like passing the gas station
a thousand times, but not really seeing it until you need gasoline. It makes so
much more sense now, and it will continue to make even more sense.

Posted in Deep Thoughts, Self Improvement | No Comments »

Purchase The Passion Test and Get a Wealth of Gifts

May 22nd, 2006

The last few days have been very enlightening - my cup runneth over. I’ve read T. Harv Eker’s Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, am half way through Chris
and Janet Attwood’s
The Passion Test, and am also half way through John Assaraf’s
The Street Kids Guide To Having It All
(There is a site at www.TheStreetKid.com as well, which appears to be down).

My purchase of The Passion Test through their web site, gave me an electronic version of that book, plus around 40 other free gifts. Among these gifts are an electronic copy of the Street Kid, as well as other e-books. I also got a free 30 day
subscription to Healthy Wealthy And Wise magazine, including their Real Life Legends (RLL) Club, which allows me to listen to their archives of interviews (membership required) with all sorts of amazing people. There are also transcripts of a lot of these particularly notable interviews included in the Passion Test book, in
case you don’t want to go for the (free for the first month) magazine subscription.

Note that the electronic copy of the Passion Test appears to be a pdf file of graphics - I ran this through OCR to get a true electronic copy. The Street Kid was a PDF which I could read in Acrobat Reader, but I could not export it to text.

This is a plethora of mind opening, inspiring, powerful, and exciting resources for approximately $11 plus shipping
- definitely take advantage of it! I’m still downloading pdf and mp3 files from the Passion Test free
offer page (this page is accessible for 7 days after purchase).

Posted in Books, Self Improvement | No Comments »

The Success Principals Accepted BY BookShare

May 17th, 2006

My submission of The Success Principles to book share has been accepted this morning:

Dear Ivan,

We are pleased to inform you that your submission of The Success Principles: How to Get From Where You Are, TO Where You Want To Be
by Janet Switzer, Jack Canfield has been reviewed and accepted for Publication on Bookshare.org. Eligible members of the
Bookshare.org community now have the opportunity to enjoy your book in an accessible format. Thank you for making this possible.

Sincerely,

Bookshare.org Volunteering

Next I’ll submit the recently scanned Secrets of the Millionaire Mind - another good book (which I am three quarters through at the moment).

Posted in Books, Accessibility | 1 Comment »

VMWare Goes Production

May 16th, 2006

VMWare’s free server product has gone production in a couple of ways - we’re running a RedHat Enterprise Linux VM at work to facilitate exchanging files with other institutions, and I am running a FreeBSD 6.1 VM on my colocated opteron server to do some monitoring with nagios.

Both VMs suffer from a bit more clock drift than I’d like.

The Linux VM initially gained time like there was no tomorrow (or more like tomorrow was already today). I added “clock=pit” to the kernel options (the kernel line in grub.conf, see
this VMWare KB article for more info) and now the clock stays around 23 seconds too slow, when running ntpd.

Things are simelar with the FreeBSD VM - after adding hint.apic.0.disabled=1 to /boot/loader.conf, to disable apic, the clock now runs about 30 seconds too fast.

IT’s recommended that we install VMWare Tools, which can syncronize the clock for us - I tried this on FreeBSD, but that VM is not running X-Windows, and the VMWare Tools GUI appears to be the only interface. I have yet to try VMWare Tools on the Linux VM (but I need to).

The VM isn’t affecting the host OS or applications.

While the VM boots it can use up to 30% of the CPu (Opteron 148). Call quality with Asterisk is not affected thus far. Of course the call volume to Asterisk in the host OS, nor the amount of things Nagios is monitoring in the VM, are not at all heavy.

The balance of the dual Zeon, Windows Server 2003 machine which the Linux VM is running on, remains stable as well. IF someone happens to boot a VM running Mac OSX, performance goes all to hell, but we won’t talk about that.

The Abstraction offered by VMs is still amazing.

Running Nagios in my FreeBSD VM gives me the freedom to try all kinds of things that I wouldn’t normally be as excited about, if nagios was running directly on one of my two physical servers. The fact that the VM can be coppied, or a snapshot can be taken, is very helpful. It’s such a simple concept, but continues to feel so empowering.

Posted in VMware, FreeBSD, Linux | No Comments »

Second Server Colocated

April 22nd, 2006

Yesterday I colocated server number two at Data393. It’s a Supermicro 1010s-t
1U box, in which I have an Opteron 148, 2 GB RAM, dual 250 GB SATA disks, and (on back order) the IPMI2
add-on which will let me monitor the box, and (if the software is accessible) access the console over LAN.
Yeah, you need software to access the console, vs. using say, SSH - this (I imagine) is because the IPMI2
chip binds to one of the onboard network interfaces, and still wants to be OS independent.

Right now the box is only running Asterisk on CentOS, but may run VMWare’s free server product (depending on how that
will affect Asterisk’s performance.

I ended up purchasing the box through Genstor Systems,
Inc. - a Supermicro VAR (Value Added Reseller). Raj at Genstor gave me good service, and having them
build and burn in the system helped me to move on getting a reliable box colocated, instead of letting
myself be bogged down by doing everything on my own.

It took some time to rack the box, because we needed some help from one of Data393’s operations staff to
know for sure which brackets went where. Too bad I can’t know everything, all the time.
Thanks Justin and Sarah for helping us get the box going.

I’ve got a cross over cable between the second network interfaces on each server, which I use for
out-of-band communications (backing up data to the alternate box, providing DNS and SMTP to the second
box). There is also a NULL MODEM cable connecting the two boxes, so I can get serial console on one box,
from the other. Of course, I can not have both boxes sending boot messages and login prompts to the serial
port - they might start talking to each other in ways I didn’t design — if they booted at the same time,
one box’s boot messages might select something from the other box’s boot loader menu.

Posted in Asterisk, Colocation And Datacenters | 3 Comments »

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