2003 was for us a year of transition in many ways. This began with the completion of our move to San Jose, marked by a lot of shelving, and numerous trips to Office Depot and Ikea. The long commute was fortunately mitigated by car pooling, with Lanchi dropping up Tuan in Menlo Park before continuing to Foster City, about one hour from San Jose, and going through an entire French language beginner's book in the process. The most important event for us was that Lanchi eventually managed to get a healthy pregnancy, after two previous miscarriages, with the baby being due for this year's March (but still in need of a name). Lanchi was quite concerned about working in a lab with chemicals, however in October, Argonaut Technologies announced that they were closing down the local R&D department, which, at that point was pretty much consisting of Lanchi and her boss. So, since she was due for a sabbatical anyways, she happily joined the growing ranks of the unemployed in the Silicon Valley and America and was looking forward to get at least good naps. However, between searching for new orchids on the web, maintaining her plant collection, making the composite images, the voluntary work that she does for ACWP (Aid to Children without Parents), including managing the distribution of cows and scholarships for the disadvantaged kids in Vietnam, preparing prints for charity auctions, and the photography business (more on it latter), she found out that days went by pretty fast at home. Despite his increasing dislike for military-funded research, Tuan continued part-time at SRI where he began new work on video stabilization with Brian Burns. This was a bit of a change for him since he switched from discrete points to pixels, and from Unix to Microsoft (gulp). Nevertheless, most of his energy was put into adding material and e-commerce features to his photography web site, terragalleria.com. In this third fiscal year, critical for tax purposes, thanks to increased traffic, the business eventually picked up enough for the operation to be profitable, and for some well-known publications to notice our images. Tuan had the satisfaction to see his unlikely business model (reach clients using only self-assigned stock images on the web) beginning to work, and decided to continue this experiment for one more year. Besides putting order in the paperwork, Lanchi found herself enrolled to help with the preparation of digital files and prints, where she found out that Photoshop can still be painfully slow even with 2.4Ghz and 1G of Ram, 1T of disk space is not that much, and it is a struggle to make the color match between screen and prints, especially if you have a sensitive eye for color. Because of the pregnancy, Lanchi spent most of her time at home. We had nevertheless a few short trips, like the one where we drove down to Gorman and returned in a day, more than 300 miles South of San Jose, to see the hills covered with spring wildflowers. Another one was a backpacking trip to the high Sierra where we shared the gorgeous granite rimmed lake with only one other camper, while as an exceptional circumstance Tuan's big camera got left at home. Our only long trip was during the spring, when we traveled to France to spend some time with Tuan's mom. After renting a car in Paris, we went to Grenoble to visit Tuan's uncle and auntie, and stopped briefly near Marseille at a friend's place before driving into Italy for a whirlwind tour (for a large selection of images from that trip, see the website above). After a frustrating experience trying to find a hotel through the maze of narrow streets of Florence, we decided to avoid the large cities for the first part of our trip. We quickly saw the enchanting town of Siena, which has Italy's best preserved medieval architecture, the ancient villa of Hadrian and the renaissance villa of Este in Tivoli. We enjoyed the boat rides and a hike between the small villages of the Cinque Terre, as well as the spectacular road of the Amalfi Coast near Naples, winding between steep cliffs and the Mediterranean. After two short weeks, Tuan dropped Lanchi at the Naples airport, and proceeded back North with his mom through Rome (where mom managed to make it to the top of Saint Peter's Dome), Tuscany, and Venice. Although Tuan went on less trips than before, he still rounded up his National Parks project with a trip to the Southern Appalachians in the spring, one to the Rockies in summer, and the Colorado Plateau in the fall. Despite multiple gear failures, he had a great experience backpacking up and down from the North Rim to the River with a 70lbs pack, and managed to estimate by eye his exposures to less than 1 f-stop. He is now getting serious about preparing a book and is looking for a publisher. We wish to you and to all your loved ones a year full of happiness, health, prosperity, and success, and hope to hear some news from you. Tuan and Lanchi 3159 Ravenswood way, San Jose CA 95148, USA (1) 408-223-8419 or (1) 408-274-2227