As one of volunteer bike mechanics (I was the short Chinese guy who spoke with an Aussie accent!) at Playa Bike Repair, let me just say that even though may of us put in long hours at that camp, it was worth the cramped hands. The respect, kudos and love that we got from our fellow Burners was humbling. I rarely had to wait in line for coffee, ice or pancakes whenever I let it be known that I was picking up supplies for our camp or that I was due on shortly for a shift. I reckon that only people who got more respect than us were the EMRs and Rangers.

And for those questioning the cost of the bike rentals, keep in mind that those rental fees not only paid for the bike transportation, but also for the also the spare parts and oils/lubricants we handed out to fix thousands of bikes throughout the entire week and to keep the generators running to power our air compressors and camp amenities.

Cheers,
Andrew

"All of this, along with some apparent recorded visits by US military and intelligence computers."

I can't believe how many people took that and ran with it imagining some grand conspiracy that was never there. Eon8 had a live feed of HTTP referers, so some one probably thought it'd be a great joke to spoof a visit from the CIA and the Pentagon which isn't hard at all considering there's even Firefox extensions that can do it for you.

And the fun keeps on going now that the Wikipedia article for Eon8 has been nominated TWICE for deletion resulting in much flamage and sock puppetry by the SomethingAwful and YTMND crowd.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_fo r_deletion/Eon8_(2nd_nomination)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_fo r_deletion/Eon8