I know I'm a week late in rounding up my Virginia posts, but this last one is nothing less than great. As you can see, it has nothing to do with my photography, which is a bummer because it is better than all my VA photos combined.

Everyone knows how much I love exciting, quirky, awesome people, just doing their own thing, living in their own definition of reality. Well, I met the epitome of that in Reston, VA, in the wonderfully brilliant/insane, patented iconographer of the AOL running man.

Dino is amazingly talented in so many things from drawing icons to locating and reselling vintage mod furniture. There are countless Dino stories I can tell, just in meeting for a short amount of time. Example? About a year ago he gave up his cell phone in light of using pay phones all over the world, ending up in Mumbai as his unplanned, last pay phone call.

Anyway, the above is a screen shot of his attempt to auction off his AOL job for a dollar on eBay. Why do this, you ask? Well, he hated his job, but AOL couldn't fire him, because he was the one that created their entire look. He once even told a superior that he couldn't possibly make a deadline because he didn't live on the same space and time continuum that said boss did.

Neither one of these events got him fired.

I'm almost positive you will not be able to read the above, so if you've come this far in my post, you will have the luxury of enjoying its conceptual brilliance as well as its absurdity. You may also unfortunately notice the lack of a "Buy It Now" button, which I was sad to not see as well.

Heading: AOL JOB Graphic Art Designer Position America Online - (eBay item 110168540255 end time Sep-19-07 17:52:02 PDT)

Body: A prestigious Senior Designer JOB is yours now for pennies on the dollar and with no reserve. This is Big. This is up there with the Yahoos, the Googles, the Adobe Systems, and even those fancy start-ups in downtown San Francisco! Seriously. The upper **k plus bennies. I will even throw in all my personal belongings, and the 'cotchkeys' that I have collected over the years, basically everything within my pod walls that is not nailed down or chained. And with some "Sweet Sweetness" I could be coaxed into throwing in my Rossi 45R Burr Grinder, and my new Sacco Espresso Machine. And even set you up with some pretty cool co-workers, get you fit in nice.

I enjoyed my years in company, and just felt it was time to let her go out into the wild, perhaps someone out there will appreciate her as much as I did. I put a lot of time into this one and I hope it shows well.

'Strong to Very Strong' ability needed to maintain, achieve and keep this position and it does need quite a bit of attention. The usual Commercial Art needs like Illustration, Logo Development, Layout, Light animation and other stuff, you know, and of course the attention span for meetings, personal time management, project management and other things that are acrobatic for most artists.

Cheers,

Mediascapegoat

Ps. Just put the dot com after the name. Good Luck.

^ (just an aside, mediascapegoat.com is Dino's website which received a spike in in-flow during the two days it took AOL to realize the ad was up and to call eBay to take it down.)