Need for Speed: CNS instructor enjoys high gear sports

By Sarah-Jane Sanders
TSTC Coordinator of Publications

For Computer Networking & Systems Administration Master Instructor Jimmy Summers, risk taking is no light matter. But through years of practice and proficiency, he has found the rewards of extreme activities exceed the risks as much as the ocean exceeds a kiddie pool.

"I’ve done some things few other people will do," Summers said. "I’ve experienced free-falling from up to 14,500 feet and have seen some of the most beautiful sunsets from in the clouds. I’ve played hockey with people from the NHL (National Hockey League) and with personnel from teams like the Dallas Stars. And in motorcycle racing, I’ve ridden with some of the best people in the world."

But, Summers would be the first to tell you he didn’t start out in the big leagues.

On the road
He bought his first motorcycle right after graduating from college and had no intentions of racing.

"At the time, I thought racing was for guys with sub-high school educations with nothing better to do than run circles around a racetrack."

However, after attending a few races and making friends with some big name racing families, he cautiously took up the sport.

"I didn’t want to be one of those (motorcycle death) statistics, so I bought one of the leather suits that the racers wear with the boots, helmet and gloves."

Summers rode in the racing circuits for four years until an accident at an association Grand Nationals race caused significant damage to his motorcycle and left him with minor injuries.

Despite this, his skills and abilities later qualified him as a Rider Coach candidate for the internationally known California Superbike School.

Recently, he has taken up teaching racing techniques with the RideSmart motorcycle school based in Austin. He also continues to hone his racing skills, and often rides his bike to work.

In the sky
Skydiving is another of the various daredevil sports Summers enjoys. He began jumping while he was a student studying at A&M University and joined A&M’s skydiving club soon after seeing a campus demonstration.

Summers’ first jump story, however, sounds like a recipe for disaster. His parachute ripcord caught on the plane, causing it to deploy prematurely. Then, he opened a reserve chute, but found the navigation toggles had not been fastened correctly which prevented him from steering. After missing several dangerous obstacles, including a major highway, a construction site and power lines, Summers touched down about 1,000 yards from the target landing area.

Throwing caution quite literally to the wind, Summers made a second jump the next weekend, and now has approximately 190 safe landings under his belt, as well as several levels of jump licenses and awards.

I made a second jump to see what the first jump should have been like," he said, "and I’ve been hooked ever since."

Though his skydiving habits began on a whim, Summers said he happened into ice hockey because of a girl.

Around the rink
To impress a woman he was dating, Summers planned a special date that would end with a bit of romantic ice skating. In preparation for the date, he took skating lessons at a rink in Dallas.

During first lesson, he ran into an old skydiving buddy who encouraged him to try out hockey. Later, when things fell through with his girlfriend before the skating date could be arranged, he stayed with the skating lessons and took up the popular ice sport.

At the time, Summers lived and worked in Waco, but made a 100-mile drive to the nearest ice rink in Dallas to continue his skating classes and hockey games. When a position for a youth and children’s hockey program coordinator and team coaching assistant with the now disbanded Waco Wizards opened, Summers jumped on the opportunity to practice and teach hockey in town.

He worked with area youth and children, instructing them in basic hockey techniques so they could show off their skills between periods of Wizards hockey games. From there, Summers took a job coaching the fledgling Baylor hockey club, and later went on to guide the Texas A&M hockey club to its all-time best season.

Currently, he is coaching less, but finds time to play hockey at least once a week for a men’s recreation league in College Station.

Pushing his limits
Despite his long history of daredevil sports, Summers has kept his injuries to a minimum. A few broken fingers and ribs, a broken collarbone and some bumps and bruises are the most damage he has sustained.

Some might call him lucky, but Summers say it is his caution and practice with the sports he enjoys that has kept him free from major accidents.

"There’s a level of expertise required to do these activities well, and a mind set you have to have to do them right. If you learn it, then it becomes very challenging and satisfying," he said.

Throughout his career of extreme activities, Summers said he has been driven by more than just risk taking.

"There is something else to it," he said. "It’s not just the thrill. It’s not just being a daredevil. It’s deeper … It pushes my limits, it pushes my knowledge, increases my faith in God and my appreciation for this earth and what he’s given me. He’s given me the ability to do all this."

So, what’s next for Summers? He said scuba diving and piloting are things he’d like to consider as he pursues his next adventure.

Just say “NO” to Bad Pick-up Lines

“Hey girl!... Mmm Hmmm…” Ignore
Random boy in the hallway #1: “Hey, you go to school here?”
“No, I work here”
“You a counselor?”
“No.”
“Oh, well I wanted to ask someone about changin my major. You don’t do that?”
“No.”
“Man, what you do here?”
Random boy in the hallway #2: “Look sexy, that’s what she do.” Ignore
“I work on the newspaper.”
“Oh, so you got a boyfriend?”
“No.”
“You married?”
“No.”
“You looking?”
“No, but if I decide to you’ll be the first to know.” (sarcasm galore)
“Alright then. You stay sexy now… Mmmm Hmmmm.” Ignore

This is a typical transaction for me. It happens at least once, if not more everyday.
What’s the answer to this problem?
Ignore, say “NO,” repeat. Welcome to TSTC.

Lost Innoncence

I've been thinking a lot about innoncence.

Innocence in the sense of not knowing. Because once you know something, you can't get back to ignorance. You have to live the rest of your life knowing. I think there is a heavy burden that goes along with that.

It's sort of like Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. They could never go back, just like we can never go back to our childhood before life got complicated. When it was easy to love without inhibitions, and you knew God because he was God. There was no question of his existence. You just knew. Like you knew your parents loved you. It was undoubtable.

The more you know, the more you find doubts about. You realize, what do you really know? I think that is what Jesus meant when he talked about having faith like a child. Children don't doubt because the "knowledge" of the world hasn't taught them the world isn't safe. They aren't jaded.

But sooner, more than later nowadays, they learn pain, evil and sadness. It is the knowledge of good and evil: emphasis on evil. Their hearts harden and the sting of the fall of mankind haunts them. We may not realize the implications the fall has caused until we realized where we once were.

The perfect garden. Immortilized in our minds as a day in our lives when we weren't burdened with the knowledge that we are no longer innocent. We merely were.­­

Painting courtesty of pincel3d

Productivity Lemonade Audio

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Productivity Lemonade: How do I survive in the mundane working world?

"Go on the hunch of a man whose brain is fuelled by lemons!?"

In an attempt to be more productive. Which is honestly America’s favorite word: productivity.

“We must be more productive, people should be productive, companies should be productive. We must squeeze the little ‘producers’ like the lemons that they are and get the very last drop of juice out of them before we throw away the empty, shrunken, shriveled rind of a person that is left. But only after we’ve gotten all of their working days and productivity squeezed out of them.”

So, that might be a little morbid, but…that’s sort of my current outlook on life as a newly hired member of the American workforce.

Anyways, in an attempt to become more productive, I am trying a new style of writing. That is to say, I will be dictating what is on my mind to my digital recorder. Often times I find I lose a thought before I have a chance to write it down, which I believe is the story of my life. I never have any time to write anything down. For goodness sake, I’m a writer and I don’t have any time to write things down.

I find that thoughts occur to me in the oddest places: while driving, while in the bathtub, while at work when I need to be working and not writing things for fun, while walking down the sidewalk on the way to who knows where and other various, random places. I have no control over when inspiration strikes. My muse wakes up from whatever bender she’s been on and helps me to think of something brilliant (in the loosest sense of the term).

And I think of how inspired I feel and how much I want to write or blog or just type my feelings. But the American productivity takes over and I lose any time I would use for writing doing something mundane like laundry.

Maybe I’m not a writer. I don’t write because the need flows out of me; I write because it’s work. I guess I’m afraid of losing the joy, the spark, the whole reason I like to write. Beside the fact that as a journalist I like to meet people and hear their stories, I like to write because you’re recording history, you’re recording feelings and your connecting with other human beings in a deep and meaningful way (if it’s done correctly).

Of course I’m not saying that I’m an expert, but I have read experts and I know what good writing looks like. And honestly, how can you be good at writing if you don’t practice? Or if you don’t write something and let it go out into the wide world like a baby bird and see if it will fly or plummet to the ground at a speed of 9.8 m/s2 (which is as everyone knows the speed of gravity acceleration on earth).

So, I thought why don’t I just talk about what is on my mind, transcribe said interviews with myself and upload it to my blog. **Pause for deep thought**

After a pause for deep thought (no I won’t tell you the question for the meaning of life, the universe and everything), I’ve decided to continue this blog in the same happy, upbeat way I began it: talking about productivity and work and the working world.

I wish I could say I had more positive responses. Honestly, I think I have worked quite a bit. I would like to think that my time working at my college newspaper was a pretty regular job. I would come in at 8 or 9 a.m. and work until 5 or 6 p.m. with obvious breaks for classes, interviews and food. It was a happy existence. I had the opportunity to wear T-shirts, shorts and flip-flops every day or dress medium, medium well or well done. (I tend to think that wardrobe can be rated on the same scale as a cooked beef.)


I think I had a pretty regular working schedule, and that was actually what I was striving for. So that when I assimilated into this mode that is the American working day, I would have no trouble adjusting.

I had the same type of schedule at camps, only it was more amplified. The hours were from around 7 a.m. to midnight. Insane schedules! There were plenty of breaks, but it was still really arduous work.

At the same time I think that both of these jobs were connected to something I really enjoyed, I got to hang with people I loved and I got to have fun.

I think I’m still searching for that in my new job. I’m not saying I’m required to have fun at work. But it’s a big bonus to have fun at work. So, maybe that’s my problem. I’m not having as much fun as I could.

What’s that? I can hear all of you wry, sarcastic people in the back. You’re probably thinking about the first time you were disillusioned with your 8-5 job, and trust me I’ve heard it enough from my father who likes to josh me about, “Welcome to the real world.” Still, I think that my experiences in the working world have been better than what they are right now.

There have been bright days, but on the whole I can’t same that I’m enamored with my new job, yet. It could be that I’m still in the adjustment period, and it is a BIG adjustment as everyone reminds me. I guess I’m suffering from boredom and fatigue and maybe the novelty of my job. Not in the sense of a novelty toy, but as a new thing. As the dictionary probably defines it, something new and different, something unique or something I haven’t experienced before.

The novelty of the “mundaness” of life. I don’t know. I would like to think that there’s a lot more to life than “mundanity,” as if that’s even a word. It kind of calls to mind a picture of the Vogon in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (rock on all your nerdfighters[i] out there who enjoy that). A Vogon’s life is run by rules and regulations, paperwork and set schedules that never change. On a whole that’s quite depressing. The worst part is they don’t realize how depressing it is because that’s what they’ve always done. AHHHHHHH! Please save me from that type of drone-like existence.

I’m trying to figure out what the solution is, but I can’t. Maybe it’s giving up and being assimilated into the borg that is American working life or maybe there are other alternatives. This is something to explore in the future. If you have any suggestions please let me know.

This is Sarah-Jane signing off: sayonara, ciao, good night.
Transcribed from a 9:49 min. interview.


[i]: Nerdfighter is the official name for the viewers of the Brotherhood 2.0 v-log on YouTube.Or the name of a nerd who knows kung fu or other fighting skill.