AirRun. Cloud crowdsourcing errands. There's an app for that.

Me and my friend like to tell each other crazy money making schemes that we want to do. Last time I spoke to J., he was telling me about another great idea of his. I thought it was pretty cool, and left it at that.

Just today, I found out that the idea was so great, that someone's already done it. And, of course, I signed up for it. They called it AirRun. This short video explains it all:

Basically, you can apply for or request an errand. You pay (or get paid depending on if you are a 'Runner' or a 'Seeker') with cash, check, PayPal or Square.

That's it! Brilliant. Let's see how it pans out.

A girlfriend in the cloud?

Cloud Girlfriend. What?

Yes. I have a girlfriend in the cloud. What does it mean? I don't know yet, but I'm beta testing one.

I signed up for the open beta of Cloud Girlfriend (with the permission of my real girlfriend. Thank you  A., for putting up with this. It is all for science). I got accepted a week after the request, and now I'm in.

Here's my experience:

I was asked for a gender and gender preference. Then I had to choose a 'fantasy' first and last name (I chose Aristotle Danger) and a fake image. I couldn't upload my own image, but I could choose among a pool of relatively good looking men. So I picked one that sorta looked like me but bit sexier.

Next I was asked chose from a list of five binary choices of who I was (Don Juan or Don Quixote was one. Tough choice, but and I chose Quixote) and another 5 binary choices of what I was looking for in a (choose one) male or female. Lastly, a short fantasy bio for me and a short text of what I was looking for.

I was then told I to request a 'date.' I flipped through images of women (two of them were repeat images) with 1 line bios. I requested 4 dates rapid fire. A girl ("Karen Robertson") accepted my 'date' request (apparently "Tits McGee" was unavailable), and we went into a chat that reminded me of the way the iPhone does text messaging with bubbles. We chatted for a minute. The fake person was flirty and nice. I left the chat.

So far as I can tell, it is like Chatroulette, but the person on the other end is hired to be nice to you. Sort of a curated chat.

Overall it wasn't a bad experience. Will I do it again? No. Is it a worthwhile service? Um. I can think of a few (unusual?) scenarios where you might want to fake that you have a girlfriend, but it doesn't look like it does that. It's just a chat room. You can find one anywhere online if you want.

Mapping L.A.

Mapping L.A. is the efforts of a community to figure out just what it is.

LA has some 114 neighborhoods and the lines between them is not so obvious. In some cases, it is hotly contested. The city never officially designated these areas, even though the post office and many of it's residences have.

This is especially a problem for reporters. They need to accurately tell the location of events, but it this becomes difficult when one doesn't know where one is.

So the LA Times decided to crowd source the problem and created a project where they will be taking suggestions and drawing up a map of where all the little neighborhoods in LA actually are. They call it Mapping L.A.