A few coworkers and I have traveled to Boston, MA for The Ajax Experience conference at the Westin Waterfront. It’s running today thru Wednesday and is covering the gamut of Ajax patterns, techniques, bells, whistles and hare-brained ideas in the industry.

We arrived last evening. The hotel is really, really nice. It’s brand new, with flat panel televisions and really large bathrooms. It’s very contemporary furnishings and “un-crushed” chairs and couches. The computers were down, though, so after an interesting “here, let me write your information down and give a room key” transaction, we headed to the LTK restaurant down the street… quite good. Afterwards we wandered back to the hotel, and I decided to hit the lobby restaurant/bar called Sauciety and have a scotch before bed.

While I was there, I met two HR representatives from Ask.com named Kelly and Amy; very fun people. Amy works for Kelly, and once they learned I was there for the same conference, they proceeded to tout the benefits from using Ask.com, (vs. other engines I was not allowed to mention by name without a dirty look).

We were having a nice time talking, so they snuck me in to the Speaker/Sponsor reception around the corner. I got to meet a few of the speakers… most were tired from the trip and were there only to pick up their registration materials (and free iPod). A few were playing some tile game called Hive… the gameplay logistics were lost on most of us, but they looked like they were enjoying it.

After the reception, we wandered over to the other lobby bar, The Birch Bar. It was there I met the booth guys from IceSoft, a Canadian JSF/JavaScript framework company with a booth downstairs. After a couple of hours talking geek and hearing a much more, er, robust pitch about Ask.com, it was off to bed for an early morning.

It was a nice start to an exciting conference. I’ll be (well, attempt) blogging about each day I’m here, perhaps even each session. Stay tuned!