I just came back from a day at the 2004 Ohio Airports Conference in Columbus, hosted by the Ohio Department of Transportation and the Ohio Aviation Association. However gloomy the weather insisted to stay, the mood inside was festive and jovial. I missed the keynote speaker but was well in time for a series of lectures by the Federal Aviation Administration and Ohio's Homeland Security. News flash: government bureaucracies are reshuffling themselves To Better Serve You, Gentle American. They mean well, I'm sure. But my colleague leaned over to me during an overture on how every FAA agent will report to two-and-a-half people during a time of bureau transition and said "this is just government-talk." To which I replied "it's like decribing a Rube Goldberg invention. Sure, it's an admirably complex design but do you really need all of that to crack open an egg?" We also poked fun at the FAA's Joint Planning Development Office, a place where, ostensibly, men who sound like Professor John Frink of The Simpsons fame predicting that "planes will be piloted by robots. Stewardesses will be robots, although the passengers won't mind because they'll all be robots, too. This will happen, of course, two to three years after the end of The Robot Wars." A good time - good food, information and laughs. There's no better time to be had than with aviators.