Clayton,

We can discuss your request  when I come back to the office on Monday.

Regarding the trip to Portland. Such a trip requires an  explicit prior 
permission from your boss,
myself in his absence, or Stinson in my and Vasant's absence.
In case you did not ask for such a permission before, the request  is denied.


Vince






	Clayton Vernon @ ENRON
	07/20/2000 03:12 PM
	
To: Vasant Shanbhogue/HOU/ECT@ECT
cc: Vince J Kaminski/HOU/ECT@ECT 
Subject: status

Vasant-

I hope you had a wonderful vacation back home, and are rested and recovered 
from the long flight back.

I wanted to give you an update of the EOL project, the Gas Model, and of my 
intentions here at Enron.

Software (in compiled C on the Unix platform) has been developed and debugged 
to listen to the EOL trades, process them, book them, and file them away. In 
addition, software has been developed and debugged to mark these to market on 
a continual basis, and to store the entirety of open positions on EOL in a 
dynamic matrix facilitating analysis. IT has yet to get back with me on how 
the software can be informed of those trades ultimately rejected for credit 
purposes.

These data files are stored in a format for reading by Excel or by SAS, for 
which I have written the data step program and basic tabulation routines 
elucidating the structure of the data.

I am in the process of documenting all of this for you.

With regards the Gas Model and its slow performance on the Compaq, Dell has 
agreed to loan me one of their competing machines to the Compaq, to see if 
the performance issue of the LP is related to the Compaq. I have been 
researching this issue with IT here and with Compaq and Dell. The new machine 
will be here any day now (no financial obligation to anyone), and I will be 
able to immediately ascertain whether the problem the model is having is 
Compaq-specific.

I am also in the process of documenting the Gas Model for you.

I've tried to do my best for you, Vasant, but I have been frustrated by not 
only the death of my mother but some internal systems in IT here. Just the 
other day, SAS could not open a full query of the EOL database because there 
wasn't enough free space on the server's hard drive for the workfiles. In 
discussing some of these issues with some good friends of mine in power 
trading, people whom I have known for over 10 years, they indicated they were 
ubiquitous here. The power traders have similar PC's to my new one, and they 
have complained from Day 1 that theirs are slower than their old ones.  Also, 
there remains a large frustration with the development of data warehouses; 
during my brief tenure here IT has gone through two differing proposals as to 
how to address this. When I have been told of tools available for real-time 
data harvesting, my requests for such have typically been met with "well, we 
have it, but we haven't really tested it yet." An example is the weather: we 
still do not record to disk the hourly NWS observations from the GOES 
satellite.

My interests here are to help Enron to do well, because I will do well only 
if Enron does well. These aren't empty words- my IRA is 100% invested in the 
Enron stock fund. I believe my best contributions to Enron will be in the 
areas of systems as well as modeling, and the difficulty working in the 
Research Group, in terms of systems development, is that, frankly, few people 
at Enron seem to care what a researcher thinks about our systems. We aren't 
directly generating revenues for Enron, and we aren't really their customers, 
except in our relatively small deparrtmental infrastructure expenses.

As it happens, Power Trading posted an opening for a Modeling and Forecasting 
person, and I spoke with them and they asked me to take the job, reporting to 
George Hopley. It is a wonderful opportunity for me, Vasant, as they are 
interested in large system modelng of power grids as well as improving their 
traders' access to real-time fundamentals data. I was completely candid with 
Kevin Presto regarding my shortcomings here in Research- I told him you were 
disgusted with me because I repeatedly failed to meet time deadlines. They 
also understand I have yet to be at Enron for 1 year, and thus may only bid 
on a job with your permission. We agree the move is good for Enron; we all 
work for Enron, and your acquiescence to the move does not endorse it but 
merely permit it. They are comfortable with me- they have known me for years 
as a hard worker, honest and unpretensive. They have already ordered a 
state-of-the-art Unix workstation and server for me, and they have told me 
they will commit whatever resources are necessary for me to be successful, 
including hiring an Analyst to work for me. And, I have already been able to 
teach their analysts improved techniques for data harvesting and analysis I 
have learned here.

So, I am requesting your permission to bid for this job opening. It would be 
a lateral move in position and salary, and I would commit to you to help you 
in any way possible in the future with regards the Gas Model or the EOL 
database. I will continue to work on their improvement, and complete their 
documentation.

As it happens, I am away on Enron business in Portland Monday and Tuesday, 
and will be back Wednesday. I had wanted to talk face-to-face instead of by 
email, but Enron business supercedes- I am on a team designing the data 
warehouse for floor trader support.

Clayton.