Geotracking: Never Lose your Spouse in the Supermarket Again
May 8th, 2007 by Eats Wombats
My Vista PC decided to upgrade its Java software today. I acquiesced, but I was not overjoyed to have to download and install 23Mb of files to handle foreign languages, apparently simply because I wasn’t in the US. I can remember my first hard disk, it was 10Mb. Now, a totally unecessary software update was double that size. I complained to Sun (somebody has to). However, I was a little mollified later when I tried out a Java application I’d never seen before.
Click on the map above to see a screen grab or here, if you have Java installed, to see Boston’s airport with planes arriving and landing. I chose Boston from the list available because it’s a place I visit now and then. There’s a delay factor and some of the information is withheld for security reasons. You can click a plane and see that it’s an MD88 flying at 5,100ft or an A340 at 8,000ft. You can see planes circling when the airport is busy and a line of planes coming in to land at 2 minute intervals. I thought it was a cool application and a harbinger of what’s surely coming: checking on the whereabout on the map of your family and friends via your cellphone, and annotating photographs with geo coordinates, and more. Here’s a first list. It doesn’t include geonames.org, with whom I registered recently, and it surely doesn’t include the GPS enabled wind chimes project I read about recently. This alerts you to the imminent arrival in your neighbourhood of someone bearing a tracked phone (of course, it could alert you to the departure of a child).
The logical extension of this will be to use Radio Frequency ID tags, now being used for labeling airline luggage and pallets of goods in shipment, for ordinary objects that can and do get mislaid. Things like keys, wallets and passports can be tagged so as to respond to a radio “ping,” revealing their whereabouts. A cellphone (they now run Java) will let you see where they are. Not to “down behind the sofa” level of detail but close enough to switch to a fairly localized search.
On Sunday my other half read a story in the Sunday Times which had her laughing so much she was almost in tears. It begins
‘A day doesn’t go by when Matthew doesn’t lose his keys, his mobile or even his wallet . . . I have been to the airport on several occasions when he does not have his passport . . . He was totally incapable . . . Being married to Matthew was like having another child.
and ends
The more dependent a man is on his wife for food, fuel, clean shirts, a full sock drawer, vital clues as to the likely location of keys, passport, wallet and mobile, etc, etc, the less likely he is – in theory, at least – to dump her. Hurray!
I maintained a dignified silence while I waited for her to answer my What’s so funny? Having spied what page she was on, and having read that section already, I had a clue; but surely, surely, she couldn’t be thinking of me? I admit to asking about the whereabouts of things from time to time (she does move things; indeed she has a habit of moving things). She claimed to be thinking of a relation of hers who is forever losing things.
