About

Hello, my name is Chad La Joie. Welcome to my tiny, tiny corner of the internet.

This site contains my personal thoughts, not those of any past or present employer, on various subjects. Most posts are related to work and technology but you’ll occasionally find other topics as well. I tend to write longer posts and, as such, post less often. I do not provide any commenting support nor my email address because discourse on the internet is pretty awful currently. If you want to express your opinion on something I wrote, start your own site and put it there.

About Me

Here are some random facts about me:

  • I am a single, gay man in my 40’s (43 as I’m writing this).
  • I currently live in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
  • I’ve worked in IT my whole life. The first half of my career was spent in higher education & research institutions (Virginia Tech, Georgetown/DHS, SWITCH/CERN) and the second half has be in the private sector (Covisint (now OpenText), Aerohive Networks (now Extreme Networks), Domino’s, Hagerty).
  • Despite working at Hagerty, I am not a car person but I do quite enjoy my mojito green Jeep Wrangler. If you see a two-door, soft top driving around Ann Arbor there is a good chance it is me.
  • In school I studied physics, computer science, mathematics, and philosophy and dabbled in economics and business law but I did not graduate.
  • I live in a beautiful (to me), century-old house. Working on it is becoming a hobby of mine.
  • I play video games - mostly 4X (Civ 6, Stellaris) and JRPGs. I am not good at the 4X games; I play them on very low difficulty and just kinda zone out. They’re meditative for me.
  • I really like to bake and cook.
  • I wake up at around 3am and go to bed around 9pm.

Media

I believe that the media we consume has a significant impact on how we think about ourselves, others, and the world at large. Here’s some of my media diet.

Giving

As noted above, for the first part of my professional life I worked in higher education and research. While there I felt like I was contributing to the general good of the world. Realistically, such benefits are the benefits of supporting any basic science research: ambiguous in the time, place, and impact of their application. Since moving into the private sector my skills have allowed me to command a pretty good salary. I have decided to follow the giving pledge. I started with giving 10% but the actual plan was to give anything above my 2022 net income (when I started this), adjusted for inflation. At the time I’m writing this part (end of 2023), I’m following that plan and giving just a bit under 50% of my net income.

This is addressed by the Giving What We Can site, but I wanted to give my personal take on it here. Some people feel that being public about giving is virtue signalling and gaudy. Initially I agreed but I no longer do. When I publicly came out as gay, I did so because for years I had felt desperately alone and I wanted to let other LGBTQ folks know there was someone else with which they could talk. After various discussions with some close friends on the topic of giving, and hearing things like “I never knew who I could talk about stuff like this with”, I decided I wanted to publicly say “you can talk to me”.