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Just hours before a major Apple media event, you'd think I'd be wanting to make predictions and all of that good stuff. But I think I'll wait to see what's actually announced before trying to say much of anything about it. After all, speculating about what the company might do next year is always fun because there's not much else you can do about it. But speculating about what the company might do tomorow inevitably has a "couldn't we just wait until tomorrow and find out for real?" kind of feeling about it. So we shall see.

Interesting weekend, during which I went a full thirty-six hours living virtually divorced from twenty-first century technology. Didn't take my iBook, didn't touch any other computer either. Didn't take an iPod with me. Took my cell phone but not the charger. I guess it wasn't all that daring, as it was a weekend after all, but nonetheless it was something I hadn't done in at least a year or two. Spent the whole time in and around the Disney compound with old friends from way back. We crashed the Planet Hollywood for dinner, a four story tall planet-shaped building that at this point is significant for being one of the few Planet Hollywoods left in the country. But for us the significance was that it was the exact same restaurant that we had had dinner at ten years ago, on a high school field trip of all things. Time flies almost freakishly sometimes.

I've been trying to incorporate more walking into my daily routine, which is somewhat complicated by the fact that I don't quite have a hard and fast daily routine to incorporate it into. The challenge is that I don't usually like to go for a walk just for the sake of doing it; when I'm done I prefer to actually end up somewhere I was supposed to go anyway. The lakefront is just under a mile away, a nice leg-stretching venture, but unfortunately it falls into the former category; I get there, there's nothing to do, I turn around and walk home. There are a few destinations that fall into the latter. A pizza-by-the-slice place about a half mile away. It's the kind of place you'd find every few hundred feet in a place like Manhattan, but it just might be the only pizza joint in this entire town that sells it by the slice. I know, going on a walk and then eating pizza sort of defeats the point, but in my mind it's a bit healthier than driving and then eating pizza.

I can walk downtown, where there are a few restaurants and a movie theater. But the theater only has two screens, so there's obviously only so often that you can go there. And that's about it. The rest of the town's destinations stretch beyond walking distance. As with every other town in Florida, it's designed in such a way that walking just isn't practical as a primary form of transportation. Most streets don't have sidewalks, which is okay because most of the side streets have so little traffic that you can walk right down the middle of them. But people backing out of their driveways don't tend to catch the fact that someone is walking right behind them; if they don't see something as large as a car in their rear view mirror, it doesn't register. After all, who in Florida would be walking anywhere?

Which I find kind of ironic. Here we are in the one State where the weather makes walking ideal. There's no snow to get in the way, it's not too cold in the winter (at least down south), it's not too hot in the summer (at least according to us natives), and if it starts raining it's usually done within a few minutes. And yet I've never encountered a town in this State where people actually walk as a means of transportation. Actually, I've heard that people who live right in the heart of downtown Miami can get away with walking everywhere, but I'd imagine that the radius of where you can live and get away with it has to be pretty small.

Miami actually has a little bit of public transportation down there, but not enough, and the rest of the State more or less has none at all. Which is probably at least partly why no one takes walking seriously. There's got to be some way to get over to the other side of town in hurry when you have to, or to get your twelve bags of groceries home when the need arises, and if there's no public transportation to make that happen, then you're going to end up owning a car one way or the other. And if you own a car, you tend to end up wanting to use it for everything. Going a quarter mile down the street? Drive. Going to that pizza joint? Drive. It's an addictive habit that leaves you believing that there's only one way to get around. You wouldn't know the bus schedule if your life depended on it, you're not entirely sure whether you could actually get a taxi cab to come out to your place or not, and you wouldn't have the slightly clue about how to even learn about either one of those options. And walking is merely something you do to get from your front door to your car door.

Well, I suppose I should stop philosophizing on transportation issues and call it a day. Tomorrow there'll be actual Apple-related news to talk about, so maybe we'll get back on track in terms of keeping things on topic around here.