Indeed, very cool.
For those on PCs running Windows, there is also pingplotter (
http://www.pingplotter.com). It sends what amounts to a trace route once a second - a burst of packets back to back with TTLs varying from 1 to the number
of hops between you and whatever you're targeting. It tracks not only the end to end behavior but the behavior along the way. If you like, you can leave it running and have it send you an email with a .png of an event that is worse than some threshold. I've
attached a graphic it showed me once about a particular path I cared about that happened to have a geosynchronous satcom delay in it.
BTW, the data here is most definitely dated. A ping I just did gave me