Hello. My name is Aveek Datta. I'm taking advantage of a need to update my website to switch to a new solution, Drupal. I've never used Drupal before but content management is a hot topic now, so it seems like a good idea. The picture is somewhat old, and was taken in February 2002 in San Antonio, TX. Once I figure out gallery and image plugins except a lot more pictures.

I grew up in New York City, spending the first eighteen years of my life there. I attended Public School 20 in Flushing, NY for grades 1-4 and Public School 193 in Whitestone, NY for grades 5 and 6. Both schools were in Queens, a borough of New York City. I attended Hunter College High School for grades 7-12. HCHS was located in Manhattan; it was a long 1.5 hour ride each way to and from school.

Afterwards I left for Pittsburgh, PA to attend college and have been there ever since. I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in December 1997, with a Bachelors in Computer Science. While I was at college, I worked for Carnegie Mellon's Distance Education program while at school, along with founding and managing Monolith Internet Services, formerly at ML.ORG. ML.ORG provided free domain name services (in response to the then-new Internic charge for domain name service) for tens of thousands of users and hundreds of thousands of domains.

I left all that behind when I moved into the corporate world, and joined IBM Global Services, where I've been for the past 10+ years. I am a frequent flier who loves the miles and points, but hates flying. The airlines found a way to beat the enthusiasm for travel out of me by constant delays and treatment like cattle. But I know I've been to Hawaii all expenses paid three times, and that's only the tip of the iceberg of what I've accumulated.

Almost naturally I moved from looking for the best deals for frequent flying to best deals overall, and now I spend a lot of time in the hunt for good deals. I don't buy a lot of stuff (I'm lucky enough to have pretty much everything I want) but knowing that when I do buy something, I got the best deal, gives me a lot of satisfaction.

For my hobbies, I love hockey -- not me on the ice (I can barely move on ice, with or without skates) -- but watching the Pittsburgh Penguins play. High Def TV has changed the sport completely and its a very engrossing game. I also very happily own a Playstation 3 and get my money's worth out of it.

Finally, I also play poker; I go to Vegas about 3-4 times a year and play low stakes games there, and occasionally play at Poker Stars for even lower stakes. I most enjoy a monthly game with my friends, including my best friend Ben Shniper. However, for the most part I live a typical suburban American life in my McMansion with my wife, Jennie Datta, and our three cats.