It’s been more than a month so I wanted to let you’ll know that I made it up to Xinjiang and have been working my way around the southern road that runs on a narrow strip of green between the Xinjiang desert and Tibetan mountains. I’ll be traveling through northern Xinjiang in a week or so and In less than a month my mom will come to visit.

Like any country China has its own hand signals that have evolved uniquely from the rest of the world. For example when counting on your fingers 1 to 5 are the same as in the US but 6 to 10 include some oddities like the “gnarly dude” thumb and little finger, and “stay away from me devil” crossing of the index fingers. But as I travel in Xinjiang the most common hand signal I find is putting ones wrists side by side as if handcuffed. I get it all the time when I ask if I can stay at a hotel, once I got it when I handed a guy my email, another time when I asked a sensitive question. In Xinjiang there is an almost reflexive fear of being arrested.

The fear isn’t unfounded. There have been a growing number of reports, some official Chinese releases, some independent journalism, of Uighur’s being arrested en’masse. A quick list from memory includes: 70 in Kashgar, 14 in Urumqi, 24 in Northern Urumqi, hundreds in Hotan. I would give links but China is blocking a large swath of the internet today.

News of unrest in Xinjiang is only released by the government and it always seems to be a month after the event with no way to verify it. Lately there have been a steady staccato of reports of terrorist plans being thwarted. It seems the need for a perceived threat outstrips the need for perceived stability before the games.

More than a month ago a Xinhua piece had a story with many holes in it that a Uighur girl with ties to Al-qaida somehow smuggled small bottles of gasoline onto a plane from Urumqi to Beijing, midflight she unsuccessfully tried to light the gasoline in hopes of blowing up the plane. The logical holes in the story can only lead to one of two conclusions, either the terrorists are idiots, or the people making the propaganda are idiots.

One attempt to verify official reports by the French News Agency turned up nothing. They went to the block where a supposed full scale urban battle took place between security forces and terrorists in the capital city Urumqi. Many people who live there said they hadn’t heard or seen anything except for one Chinese man in his 50s who lives adjacent to the raid site. He confirmed ‘”They captured a whole bunch of terrorists and there was a big fight,” although he soon admitted learning of the raid only later from state media reports. “The government said so. They would not lie.”

Pin a medal on that man.

Behind these ambiguous stories are real arrests. The numbers are impossible to verify but a friend in Hotan said that hundreds of young men have been arrested in the city lately.The fear that pervades Xinjiang contrasts sharply with eastern China where the police aren’t much of a factor.

This last week in Hotan, a southern city famous for its jade, I ran across a very open man who talked about everything. This was such a breath of fresh air compared with the people who only give me the official line. When I asked if he was afraid of the government he said no, he only fears Allah.

I hope you don’t live in fear of anyone.

…in those groggy morning hours while laying in bed. His thought was effortless. Unfortunately my brain is lazy and must be forced to concentrate. Here, surrounded by the unfamiliar it is thinking all the time. New ideas pop up out of nowhere, like in high school when each class connected unseen dots on my mental map. I have 8 rolls of film shot and a notebook full of observations. So I’d call my travels so far a success.

This is just beginning and the relatively boring part of the trip, as I focus on learning the languages. But phase two looks like it might get interesting. In the last week or so the Chinese government has started cracking down on separatists in the Xinjiang region where I’m headed . I expect the protest to get louder and the crackdowns harsher as Olympics arrive. Which is when the fun begins.

I must give a shout out to the three families that have opened their arms, beds, lives, and minds to me. Those days together are the ones that change my life.

I arrived in Beijing on the first day of the new year celebration, it was getting dark, everything was closed, the fireworks made it sound like a war zone, and a little fear crept in as I couldn’t find the one person that I knew in this country. With some incredible luck I ran into his childhood friend and we got everything straightened out. Chris’s family is part of the middle-upper class, his parents are professors and researchers. They showed me around and those first few days in Beijing, took me along for a big festival family dinner and gave me a soft landing so that I could learn the very basics.

I then traveled down south one province and met a couple that work as English teachers in a rural town. They took me back to their Tolkienesque village where I was the first foreigner that had ever visited. This is the hidden, and the largest, side of China. Their family is part of the upper crust of the village, but is still relatively poor, the mother is a doctor, one son a doctor and the other a teacher. Their home was always full of visitors, family and friends that had known each other for generations. Meals were tasty and cooked on a stove of corn husks. But that style of life is no longer economically viable as farming plots shrink, crop prices fall, and cost of living rises.

Then I went even further south and ended up in Hong Kong, where I met up with of my coolest relatives, Kim and Tom who work as professors in Macau. Their vacation apartment, a little slice of heaven on an island off Hong Kong, made for a great base to relax, recuperate, and have deep discussions. Hong Kong, and Macau are completely different from mainland China, they’re so full of expats that they feel more like Europe than anything in Asia. The contrast was jarring, in a good way.

Now I’m in a central China city called Chang Ching. My day consists of starting up single line conversations, learning the words, being corrected, smiling, and moving on. I haven’t run into any English speakers around here, which just forces me to learn Chinese faster.

The internship is done. Everything is being packed up. Tomorrow I start my meandering trip home.

In my short life I have seen way too many (at least 5) photographers loose their photo archive when a hard drive failed. Hard drives will die, and when you least expect it, so backup.

My personal solution is simple but safe against any 2 of the following 3 occurring:

• Hard-drive failure
• Local disaster
• Death of the internet

If the rapture occurs, well…I won’t be too worried about my photo archive. I’ll just be chanting “f/8 ad be there” while asking Jesus for caption information.

So my three prongs are:

1) Have a single, consistent archive. It’s a pain but do it. The specifics are up to your imagination but be consistent in your naming of folders and photos so that they all fit in one orderly place and be easy to find. Mine is an external hard drive.

2) Burn the really important stuff to DVD’s

3) Backup remotely. We all have our websites and most of those websites have free space, hopefully a lot of free space. I use DreamHost, which with their specials, rewards, and discounts has cost a total of $9 for the last two years and gives 700GB of space, just enough for almost all my photos.

FTPing my whole archive up there at one time wont work (I tried). It takes days on most connections and restarts the process after each connection break.FTP programs such as Cyberduck and Transmit have a “sync” option which will mirror a folder on your hard drive to a folder on a server, and might work for some people but I found that the FTP connection broke after transfering only a few photos.

So I use a little known feature in OS X called “rsync”. Underneath the shiny surface of every mac is UNIX, an operating system created by smart, lazy, nerds for smart, lazy nerds. When I say lazy, I mean supremely lazy. They don’t even like lifting their hands from the keyboard to the mouse so everything they do on the computer was by typed commands on what is called a command line, we can see the command line by opening up the program called “Terminal” (its sitting in applications/utilities folder, or just do a spotlight search for it).

These smart, lazy, nerds created “rsync” to mirror two folders with just a little typing. But they were smart so the jumble of letters will look complicated, but trust me it’s not.

Basically every time I want to backup my archive I open terminal and copy and paste this line in and press enter:
rsync -rogpav -e ssh /Volumes/BACKUP/PhotoArchive www.incendiaryimage.com:RemoteBackup

The parts that you will have to change are in brackets:
rsync -rogpav -e ssh [local archive folder] [remote archive address]:[remote archive folder]

After typing all of this up I am starting to see how complicated it can be for the first time Terminal user, but trust me it’s doable just google any problems you run into or ask your questions in the comments and I’ll try to answer.

However you do it back up and save yourself a lot of grief.

The women were evacuated minutes before a tornado ripped off a wing of the jail. They walked out with ID cards and left their few belongings to blow across the back lawn and into fences.

A picture package of cliche personal effects after a natural disaster has a little more meaning when these are the only things that an inmate controls.

• Picture - 3 year old in grandma’s lap
• Letter - Written in spanish, starts Hola Lico
• English Muffin
• “No Turning Back”, number 267 in “The Gunsmith” series
• “While I Was Gone”, An Oprah Book Club selection about familial crime and punishment
• Letter - Starts “Amanda, You say you feel weird talking to a nice guy like me well it feels weird talking with a respectful down to earth chick like you as well.”
• Birthday Card
• Picture - Walmart quality studio portrait of a man
• Letter - From father talking about renovations, bills, weather, bears in the backyard.
• Letter - From mother, includes Sudokus, written in 4 sittings.
• Letter - “Mandy, your time has come…BJ said you broke a window and the cops came and took you to jail.”
• Letter from Public Defender
• Letter - Unfinished, only has one word, “Daddy”.

This Saturday was a Christmas festival in New Port Richey. I become a photographer unlike myself, put direct flash on, didn’t talk with people, just walked around trying to show the festival as its unvarnished self with a little symbolism.

If “The Departed” tickled more than your fancy look around for “Infernal Affair III“. In preparation for China I checked out most of the small selection of Chinese movies at the city library including this little flick. It summarizes and concludes the trilogy which was an inspiration for “The Departed”.

Whole sections of it were shot scene for scene, but there is no comparison between the epic struggle in Boston and the summer action movie in Hong Kong. Watching these two movies together has changed my view of the role a good director plays.

…like being just bored enough to check one last time who owns your namesake internet domain, and finding that it has expired. So a few nights ago I snatched up www.DavidDegner.com which now forwards to this site. This post is partially an attempt to get Google to index the new link in case I want to put something important there someday.