Meet Randy Else
"Golf combines two favorite American pastimes: taking long walks and hitting things with a stick." ~P.J. O'Rourke

There's a lot of diversity in the knowledge base of Applied Trust employees, and Randy Else is no exception.  Randy knows a lot about golf.  This is Randy's ninth season of tournament play in the Indian Peaks Men's League, and this summer he will compete in rougly a dozen individual, two-man, and four-man rounds.  The League plays primarily at Indian Peaks, but also travels to the Fox Hollow course in Lakewood.  Randy's golfing goal for 2006 is to get his handicap under 10.  Although he has been hovering near that goal for the past couple of seasons, he is looking to break the barrier this year.  Practice makes perfect!

Golfing isn't a full-time endeavor for Randy, though; he is also one of the premier network experts at Applied Trust.  Randy started out doing Unix system administration, but only for about two years before enteritng the networking space in 1994.  At that time, he was doing network design and support for Colorado SuperNet's statewide remote access network and for the Colorado Internet Cooperative Association.  Since then, he has worked with btoh large and small organizations and network service providers, helping them build the right networks for their environments.

One of Randy's favorite aspects of networking technologies is that there is always more than one way to solve a problem.  For him, finding the best way in each situation is challenging and fun.  Maybe some of the characteristics that make Randy a great network engineer - his remarkable attention to detail, his ability to focus on small details while still minding the whole, and his ability to break apart complex systems into simple elements - are also what make him such a great golfer.

Randy received his Bachelor's degree from the University of Colorado.  To learn more about him, golf, or networking, you can reach him at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

What is a golfing handicap, anyway?

A player's handicap is calculated through a proprietary USGA (United States Golf Association) formula.  It is roughly 96% of the 10 lowest scores out of the last 20 rounds.  This handicap is used in conjunction with an individual course's handicap rating to determine the number of strokes that are subtracted from a player's score.

In stroke play, the number is subtracted from the total score after all 18 holes.  In match play, every hole has its own handicap rating and scores are adjusted after each hole.

This system levels the playing field so that golfers of many different abilities can play together and end up with scored that accurately  reflect how well that player did relative to his normal play.  That way, a novice golfer doesn't always lose to the expert golfer; they both have to play their best to win.