(FORTUNE Small Business) – 1: The federal government's 2004 fiscal year begins, and this time it swears it will try to give entrepreneurs more business. In 2002 only 22.6% of the government's contracts were awarded to small businesses, just short of its 23% goal. That shortfall accounted for $900 million in lost contracts.

7: Barring some unforeseen legal delay, California gets a new (or perhaps the same) governor. But that won't make much difference to the scores of businesses--most of them small--that have left the state or shut their doors over the past couple of years.

9: The Emerging Technology Center @ Johns Hopkins Eastern, Baltimore's newest incubator, is scheduled to open. Sounds like a great opportunity, unless you like watching baseball in October.

21: The Cato Institute holds its seventh annual Technology & Society Conference at the F.A. Hayek Auditorium in Washington, D.C. This year's meeting--titled "Who Rules the Internet?"--examines how to settle international intellectual-property and antitrust disputes. (Yeah, it should take about a day to get to the bottom of that.)

27-30: Cleveland hosts the National Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Technology Transfer Fall Conference, designed to help entrepreneurs nab some of the programs' $1.6 billion in annual U.S. government R&D investment. On the agenda: proposal-preparation workshops, networking rooms, and a gala opening...with a cash bar. Welcome to the glitzy world of government contracts!