Brown and White Vol. 112 No. 23

              the brown and white lehigh university's student newspaper founded in 1894 vol 112 no 23 tuesday november 23 2004 all the lehigh news first leopards pounce hawks b&w photo by doug moquet sophomore running back marques thompson picked up 12 yards on the ground against the leopards unfortunately he and the mountain hawks both had a sub-par game against lafayette with a final score of 24-10 despite the loss lehigh and lafayette tied for the patriot league championship title see story page 20 system overload hinders registration by keenan pontoni news writer hundreds of freshmen were unable to register for classes tuesday night when a system overload crashed the lehigh portal the influx of students log ging into the portal site trying to register for spring classes resulted in a breakdown of the portal's three-year-old sun unix server the portal server was unable to transfer information to the banner server prevent ing students from registering it's like a line of traffic on a crowded freeway said roy gruver director of technology management services that flow is quite fragile and can be adversely affected by a traffic accident traffic merging or even just a car pulled off to the side of die road gruver said that some times the cars end up stopping or pulling off to the side of the road for no apparent reason other than the volume is just too high to permit a nice orderly flow because administrators did not anticipate so many stu dents logging into the portal instead of logging into banner directly through the registrar's web site the overload was unexpected gruver said it appears that the prob lem was related to the portal server not the banner com puter gruver said either the machine couldn't keep up with the registration transac tions because its processors were swamped or the proces sors were unable to access the portal disk drive fast enough to keep it from slowing down administrators and technol ogy coordinators are aware of the problem and are taking steps to help ensure smoother registrations in the future i am sure the level of frus tration was quite high gruver said if you waited until later i suspect some found that the courses they wanted were already full that's a serious impact that's not the kind of service our campus deserves and that's not the kind of service we strive to provide technical experts will be examining the details of the overload and trying to find methods to make the server capable of handling large vol umes of students logging in although it is unfortunate that this process was so terri bly slow and frustrating for students at least we now have film biography honor late baldwin by elizabeth conroy and elizabeth davies news writers a two-day event commemo rating the life of author james baldwin was held at lehigh last thursday and friday baldwin was an early advo cate of homosexual and african-american rights in the 19505 and he incorporated these themes into his books essays and plays lehigh's two-day event included a film screening lec tures and a live performance of a play about baldwin's life on wednesday afternoon sedat pakay turkish filmmak er and friend of james baldwin came to the humanities center to share both his documentary and his memories of baldwin's life pakay explained that in 1964 he saw a portrait of baldwin while studying in istanbul and became deter mined to meet and photograph this revolutionary figure he eventually met baldwin and the two became friends during the relationship pakay said he had a strong desire to immortalize baldwin's thoughts and words through film in may 1970 baldwin and pakay were back in istanbul and decided it was time to make the film pakay spent three days filming baldwin in istanbul and recording his thoughts on life love and lan guage being a man of two worlds i wanted a turkish visual world with baldwin's audio about america pakay said baldwin spent much of his life traveling but he always kept america in his heart you can make comparisons in another place that you can't while in america because while you're in america you can't see anything else baldwin said in the documen tary baldwin dealt with a unique type of oppression during his life he was a black homosex ual man and that combination bred much hatred and discrim ination but baldwin did not see overload page 8 see baldwin page 7 lafayette shocks lehigh 24-10 during the 140th meeting between the rivals see story page 20 sports 17-20 playoff information 17 travis frick 20 dean of sports 20 after a two-year absence lehigh-laf bonfire took place thursday see story page 4 news 1-8 college news briefs 2 fall into the streets 3 pandini's late nights 3 police reports 8 need holiday spend ing money see story page 9 business 9-11 lumac 9 look who's investing 11 student senate is offering a 10 bus ride into new york city today at 4:30 p.m bw.lehigh.edu quick fact baskin robbins once made ketchup ice cream this was the only vegetable flavored ice cream source www.amusingfacts.com