Monday was the official start of the Ajax Experience. Being as lazy and jet-lagged as I am, I couldn’t quite make it to the 7am breakfast. I missed it by about four hours or so. I met up with fellow Yahoos Nicole Sullivan and Stoyan Stefanov for lunch at this cool Italian place called Salvatore’s that was just around the corner from the hotel.

In the afternoon I caught a very entertaining panel moderated by Peter-Paul Koch that featured representation from four JavaScript libraries: Prototype, Dojo, YUI, and jQuery. The talk centered around cross-browser issues that the various libraries have faced, conquered, and are still annoyed by. There was a lot of interesting information floating around that event accompanied by a palpable disdain for Internet Explorer.

After that, I ran into a former co-worker, Chris Bowen, who now works as a Microsoft evangelist. He introduced me to a couple folks who work on the Internet Explorer team (Microsoft was well represented at the conference, including sponsorship of an open bar). We ended up going out to dinner at the Legal Test Kitchen to catch up.

I headed to the hotel bar to watch Monday Night Football when I returned. There, I was unceremoniously introduced to a female attendee of the conference whose first words to me where something along the line of, “Patriots suck, Giants rule!” Ouch. Still too soon to talk about it. I ended up talking with her and her colleagues, avoiding talk of football as much as possible, for a couple hours before heading back to my room.

Day 2 will be interesting as it’s the first day that I have a talk. Still not on east coast time, so this is getting interesting.