Nixta Sinks

Look at that ass

Do any of my loyal and dwindled readership (that's me basically, but I have no internal monologue) know of a way to track ships? There are web-sites for tracking aircraft (though they seem to work well only in the US, which makes tracking international flights a wee bit pointless), and you can follow your kids around these days thanks to the GPS units you surreptitiously attach to their skulls (or in the case of residents of Orange County, Aspen, and Westchester, to their fleet of cars).

But how about international cargo ships? Specifically the California Luna? I'm very shortly getting delivered to me my collection of belongings that I pack-ratted together and which The Doc didn't take off my hands, and apparently it's on the California Luna arriving soon in New York (that photo wasn't taken this morning, though it's a similar day and that's exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for). A quick search doesn't indicate any obvious way to track Atlantic shipping, though there appear to be plenty of web-sites dedicated to ship-spotters. I'd call them the Anoraks of the sea, but an Anorak is singularly sensible at or near large water, so I'll refer to them as boat-perverts. These funnel-fuckers seem to have a good many sightings of my precious California Lunar in various states of undress. There are Dutch sites, American sites, Latvian sites (albeit without pictures, but those cut-off dates give me the horn - oh baaaaby), oh and even my shippers.

Don't confuse it with the 78-year-old grandmother's tribute site. I suppose with a family name of Luna you are more likely than most to name your daughter California, but why she died at a Cemetery is beyond me, the old freak.

Now, if we could take something like Microsoft Photosynth (thanks Pete) - you'll need Win XP SP2 or Vista, but it's worth taking a look. If we could combine that with GPS based tracking (all ships have GPS and charts and such - even my uncles barnacled runaround has all that jazz), web-cam video, and Google Earth or Microsoft Live Maps (again, XPSP2), we might be onto something. Imagine the freak-out power of calling your kids up to describe to them their view as they're knocking back another buttload of crack on the waterfront.

Labels: boats, gis, perverts, tracking