Our sympathies to those who lost loved ones on September 11.

Waranga Memorial Hospital Relay for Life

The Waranga Memorial Hospital and District Nursing Service staff have entered a team in Cancer Victoria's Relay for Life in Shepparton on October 22 and 23. The team is aiming to raise at least $100 per team member through fund-raising events and donations. The first fundraising event was a movie night at Echuca on Wednesday August 10 to watch Monster-in-Law.

The second major fundraising event will be a Trivia Night on Friday August 26.

You've landed in a big city, found your room at the hotel and wonder where you can take the children for a quick meal and then go to the movies.

You've brought your laptop (fitted with a fast Wi-Fi internet connection, of course) so you load up Virtual Earth (http://virtualearth.msn.com) in your browser. Firstly you click on "Locate me", then in the "What" field you enter the children's favourite food outlet. The map is immediately overlaid with eateries and placing your mouse over each numbered site gives you the option of obtaining directions to get there. Similarly, you enter "movie theatres" to locate those close to your hotel. Choose one and from the pop-up box, choose "Details" to go to a link to find out what's showing.

MSN Virtual Earth has been on the air for not quite two weeks. It's a trial version and you'll note immediately that the aerial photography currently only covers the United States - international coverage is to follow soon. While it has some similarity to Google Earth, it has useful features such as saving searches to the scratch pad for later referral and being capable of posting off a location reference to your MSN Space. Or, after making a list of places in the scratch pad, email or blog them all at once.

To make best use of VE, refer to the Virtual Earth team's space but here's how to get started. On first loading, VE will show the U.S. map. To zoom in and out you can use the scroll wheel on your mouse if you have one or move the red pointer at the top left. Click the compass icon to move in a certain direction. If you're just exploring, switch on "Road map" so you can locate cities and towns, and then switch over to "Aerial photo". To have the scratch pad available, go to the "Tools" menu.

Finally a few words about the "Locate me" function. Unless you're connected to the Internet with a Wi-Fi service (and none of us are in the reading area), your location is decided by the Internet Protocol address provided by your ISP. Consequently, you could be "located" in Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, or another capital city. For those on Wi-Fi, the locator is very accurate, to within metres!

Do some exploring with VE, and apart from some obvious buildings such as the Pentagon and White House (both Washington D.C.), have a look at the containers waiting to be trained from the ports at Oakland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. While in Los Angeles, visit the International Airport (LAX).

It's quickly becoming a fact of life that more and more Net services expect users to be on broadband and Virtual Earth is one of them. Once you start exploring its features, your patience will be tested until the international version is ready.