Well it’s Monday morning and a few days ago I thought I would be on the road to New York City for a flight to Haiti. Instead I’m in the office trying to get the word on a new departure date.

At this point we have two options, hopefully the FAA opens the airport and we can fly directly to Port Au Prince. The other possibility is flying to the Dominican Republic and going overland into the disaster zone. The borders have been closed for a few days so we need them to open up.

With every day that passes the situation grows more dire in Haiti, some estimates have millions of people homeless or dislocated. The team will be traveling with medical equipment and money to buy any supplies they can get their hands on.

In the end I’m not too upset by the small delay. I’ve been fighting bronchitis for the last few days so the antibiotics have had time to kick in. Also, there would have been some time that a couple of the immunizations wouldn’t have been at peak protection. I’ve also been using my time to freshen up my emergency medicine skills and to learn everything possible about survival in an urban crisis situation. I’m truly approaching this from a worst case scenario. Anything less than that will make my day.

I have reached the point where the initial rush of fear about the horrible conditions on the ground have been replaced by an urgent desire to actually get there. My bosses have already spent a large amount of money just getting me ready to go. The shots alone were $300 and I won’t get into how much it costs to rent a mobile up-link for the satellite.  As this stretches out I may find myself at a point where all this preparation will be for nothing. Eventually they will have to pull the plug on the venture. Ultimately as long as I can convince the team to take me along I will go to Haiti. I would prefer to have the equipment and the ability to disseminate my work to an audience but I will shoot for myself and do the volunteer work as an individual if it comes to that.

I’ll be updating the blog and Facebook for anybody interested in following the trip as it unfolds. I’ll include all the links when I get more information.

John Doe wakes up wipes the sleep from his eyes and gets ready for another work day. Mumbling about how much he hates Monday’s our imaginary friend doesn’t bother to look both ways as he steps off the curb. Splat! aaannnnnnnddd, fade to black.

He is rather unceremoniously run over by a bus. Family and friends are shocked do the whole seven stages of grief thing and that’s the end of the Earthly story for Mr. John Doe.

Meanwhile out in cyber-space where your Facebook, Myspace, World of Warcraft, Flickr, and thousands of other possible social networking and gaming sites exist there’s a question. What happened to John?

Legacy Locker is an online solution that takes care of the details only you know. Once notification of your death is received, the system kicks in and e-mails start flying. Legacy Locker and similar sites provide their clients with a way to send off that last e-mail to their friends and loved ones. Beyond the social aspect Legacy Locker also touts the financial aspect. “While the work you do today helps your clients prepare their physical assets, there’s virtually nothing in place for dealing with online assets”. 

That rings true to me. I don’t think most people really want to think about the possibility of dying suddenly so it’s easy to see the benefit of a quick and easy online arrangement. I know I sure wouldn’t want to make an appointment to meet with a financial planner to work out the details of my passing, even if it really is the right thing to do.

So think about taking a few minutes away from battling Murlocs, and taking another what color is your Chakra quiz on Facebook and check out some of the online options so your friends can throw a proper online funeral for you.

Next to Facebook, Twitter is the hottest thing online. The beauty of the 140-character micro-blog is the quick bites of information and the people who are doing it well are even including photos.

It’s a quick and easy way to learn a lot about people and to even get a backstage pass to your favorite celebrities’ lives. (Case in point: Demi Moore’s rear end. Go Google – you’ll find it.)

But as with all new and fun stuff, there’s a problem with Twitter: the brains of the users.

People have been getting in trouble with their 140-character tweets to the world. The news has been full of high-profile tweeting misdeeds — a juror in a multi-million dollar lawsuit, an NBA player who Tweeted during a game, a member of Congress during the president’s address.

It’s not the big time famous cases that should worry any of us. No, it’s all of us little guys who find themselves in huge trouble with their employers for things they type and hurl into the cyber world. If there is one lesson to be learned, it’s that it really is a small world, and social network like Facebook, MySpace, and now Twitter are tightening the belt. If you post it, you own it and there is no way to undo something once it’s loose.

The picture I posted with this story is from nbcnewscrew, as the name says, he is a member of an NBC News crew. The crew travels all over the country covering news. His Twitter page is one of my favorites, but he demonstrates an innocent mistake that anybody could make. His photo of the smiling reporter in front of a destroyed building in Mississippi certainly contrasts with the sad faced, concerned looks you see when reporters appear on TV

Who knows what was going on when this picture was taken? But what it appears to show is the problem.

Is it heinous? No, anybody can make the same mistake. And many have. You tweet from work about a project you are working on, or even worse, you tweet from work about that boss you can’t stand. Sometimes just the tone of a tweet, not the actual content, can be enough to cause problems. We all work too much and too often, allowing frustrations to get the better of us sometimes and sharing that with the world could end with you having a new topic about which to tweet: losing your job.

Note, If you use Twitter, follow me bruce_bishop and the Chronicle at yourchronicle.

Is anything safe? The answer of course, is no.

The Koobface virus is sweeping through Facebook like a flu through a daycare class. The basic hook is an e-mail that tells you to check out a video that one of your friends found. The e-mail claims that you are in it doing something funny.

When you go to look at the the video the program then tells you to update your flash player…. that my friends is the beginning of a problem. When you hit the update you just injected the Koobface virus into your computer.

I got an e-mail like this from one of my contacts a couple of weeks ago. Fortunately I didn’t open it. She had to shut down for a while and get the bug out of the hard drive.

Update your anti-virus protection and be careful about what you download.

I am always amazed when I see the ways people manage to get themselves into trouble on the Internet – from the basics like the costly porn addictions to the yahoos that fly cross country to meet the preteen of their dreams—only to find out it’s a police officer from Avon, Ohio.

Now there is a story posted on the CNN site about the incredible damage criminal defendants are doing to their cases by posting pictures on their Facebook, MySpace, or other social networking sites.

According to the report on the CNN.com, Online hangouts like Facebook and MySpace have offered crime-solving help to detectives and become a resource for employers vetting job applicants. Now the sites are proving fruitful for prosecutors, who have used damaging Internet photos of defendants to cast doubt on their character during sentencing hearings and argue for harsher punishment.

It’s a great story, and really a lesson for everybody. Not just those with criminal intent. Your prospective employer or future in-law may just be looking you up someday.