I heard about Google Earth when it first came out, but I only recently downloaded it and tried it out. Wow. It's worth a download just to play with it. It could be pretty useful, too. It is to maps.google.com as Photoshop is to MS Paint. And keep in mind that I really like maps.google.com. Google Earth lets you fly around, tilt the map, get much higher detail (you can see my house), and overlay dozens of types of meta data. And you can get customizations for it.