Introduction

Hello. My name is Aveek Datta and this introduction was last updated in September 2016.
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 also got married to my first girlfriend right after I graduated, her name was Jennie.
I left all that behind when I moved into the corporate world, and joined IBM Global Services, where I stayed for 14 years (till 2012). I was 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 six times, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg of what I’ve accumulated. I still travel a lot on my own dime but it’s not as fun as it used to be.
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 definition TV has changed the sport completely and its a very engrossing game. I also enjoy gambling, specifically texas hold-em poker. I used to play often, online and in person, but now its more of a rare event when the mood strikes me. As a tech guy I have a lot of gadgets, and at last count eight tablets of various operating systems (Windows, Android, iOS, and others)
Now onto Aveek 2.0; I mentioned above that I made the decision after 14 years at IBM to leave and join Knepper Press as their IT Director. While I enjoyed my time at IBM, it was time for a change. Unexpectedly, but at the same time, I also got divorced from my first wife Jennie. I used that opportunity to revamp everything else in my life, downsizing from a large house too and also downsizing myself (I’ve lost nearly seventy pounds). So being the tech guy I am, that’s how I coined the term Aveek 2.0 for the phase of my life that started around April 1, 2012, when I left both my company and marriage of fourteen years..

Aveek 2.0  was short and sweet, and I met a wonderful woman in late 2013 who became my wife on August 30, 2015, which marks the next major 'upgrade' to Aveek 3.0. I also decided to take some time off to travel, so both Alexie Datta and myself resigned from our jobs at the end of January 2016 and took four months to travel to Asia, one month to travel around Canada and Northeast USA, and then one month to travel around Europe.