This is the yearbook CD that we were given in my final year in McNally Composite High School in 2002. This CD largely contained an interaction movie thing that was locked behind needing the QuickTime Player to view, which was a common piece of software to be installed on machines back then but isn’t really a thing anymore these days. How technologcal trends come and go.
Still, the CD itself came with a copy of QuickTime 5, and also came with a bunch of internal database files that I eventually managed to open using Adobe Director 8.5, another long outdated piece of software that I managed to scavenge from archive.org. From there, I extracted all the yearbook photos that made up the slideshow in the QuickTime interactive movie, and uploaded them here on the blog as well as a Mega.nz link that I hopefully remember to renew every now and then. The Mega.nz link, located here, has all the original files as well as both the QuickTime and Director installations needed to view them, as well as purer .bmp versions of the .jpg files located below here.
The important stuff is on the blog here, but that link is more complete, so go there if you want a download of the CD. In particular, there’s a VR tour thing (basically a pannable panorama of a room) that doesn’t display well outside of QuickTime — the videos are there but they don’t use the now-standard YouTube format of displaying 360-degree pannable VR videos, so there’s no good way of viewing them outside of the app.
The QuickTime interactive slideshow is divided into five sections, but the last section is that McNally VR Tour section featuring those VR videos I talked about above, so I’m skipping that section. Of the other sections, I’m flipping around the third section (Graduate Profiles) with the fourth one (Slide Show) so that the longest section, the Profiles, are at the end of this blog since they take up a LOT of space. While I don’t like that this thing was a CD instead of an actual physical book, because it was a PAIN to extract and then sort, it has some advantages over a physical book, the strongest of which was the ability to include videos on the disc.
This page was written on July 23 2022 and saw several edits on Oct 03-04 2022. Please contact jesskitten at gmail if something on this page breaks or direct communication to me about this page is needed for some reason.
Oct 03 2022: It is important upon reflecting back to note that this ATA teacher’s strike (local) happened this year as well. Good times huh! I had forgotten all about it until today, but it was an important footnote of our 2001-2002 school year.
Table of Contents
ට Graduation Videos
ට Graduation Pictures
ට Slide Show
ට Graduate Profiles
ට Misc
Links to my other McNally High School scans:
ට McNally Awards Program – Oct 17 2000
ට McNally Awards Program – 2001
ට McNally High School 2002 Yearbook CD (You are here)
If you want to jump into my weekly blogs, there’s also this memory segment I devoted to the people I remembered from McNally.
Graduation Videos
The CD contained three videos, labelled Graduation Song, Principal’s Message, and Valedictory Address. I’ve uploaded the three videos to YouTube and attached them below.
The first one is also mirrored on YouTube, and contains more details about the song. Copying the description, it says:
This is the song Arsh Khaira wrote for the graduating class of 2002 at McNally High School in Edmonton, Alberta.
words/music: Arsh Khaira
Arsh Khaira – Vocals and Guitar
Blair Brown – Drums
Brian Kong – Bass
Justin Cheng – Piano
It’s apparently uploaded by Arsh himself, and I give him lots of respect for archiving this and listing the names as well.
The second video was from our principal, Mr. George Rice.
I believe the two valedictorians in the third video were Erin Wiley and Vikram Gurtu. I’m not 100% sure though.
Graduation Pictures
These “graduation pictures” are a collection of three galleries — they’re labelled Graduation Ceremony Pictures, Banquet Pictures, and Chinese Graduation Pictures. McNally had a lot of Chinese students (we were still a minority compared to the Caucasians, but not by much), and even an IB Chinese class, so I guess we had our own cultural graduation or something as well. I didn’t attend it.
Graduation Ceremony Pictures
Banquet Pictures
Chinese Graduation Photos
Slide Show
The Slide Show portion of the interactive movie was divided into four sections — Staff, Students, Sports, and Awards. Accordingly, this gallery is also divided into four parts based on those above sections.
I recognize quite a few of the students in the pictures, but I’m not in any of the pictures myself. I did win some stuff that I probably should have been in Awards for, but McNally, like many other North American schools, hyperfixates on sports culture (particularly the basketball team in our case, even the volleyball and football teams barely feature, never mind track and so on), and the Awards section is so short that it might as well not exist. Many other students did do interesting and noteworthy stuff too, you know? Maybe acknowledge them, McNally.
Staff
Students
Sports
Awards
Graduate Profiles
I didn’t actually attend graduation, nor did I attend the photo section nor submit a quote, so I’m not actually in any of these pictures at all, I wasn’t given a spot in the slideshow. Neither are the other people that elected to skip either or both of these, so this isn’t technically the entire grade year. All our names are actually in the files though, if you open the gradblurs.cst and GradBlursGIRLS.cst files. It’s weird that they chose to divide the photos and profile pictures by gender, because the actual browsing list in the bottom right of the screen showed the male and female names blended together and listed by alphabet, but because the database was divided by gender, the pictures came out also separated by gender instead of purely by alphabet. So there’s two separate galleries here, one for female pictures and one for male ones.
For those profiles that just say NIHIL SED OPTIMUM for their message — that is McNally‘s school’s motto, so that means that the person in question had a picture but no quote. Or the quote didn’t pass muster or something to get included in the CD, hehe.
Females
Males
Misc
These are some pictures that didn’t fit in the above sections.
For the graduation videos, the extraction thing I did took a snapshot of each of the video display pages too:
The nine VR videos also had their own snapshots:
The slideshow had a “front cover” (first two pictures) as well as a “back cover” (the third picture), and i even scanned the front of the little mini CD for kicks (the fourth picture)
The CD also came with a soft elevator music track, a 28 second long piano clip entitled theme_song.mp3 that plays on loop in the background when you turn on the sound option in the interactive QuickTime presentation. It’s not actually a theme song “of the school” or anything like that, though. Just of this McNally Graduation CD.
Lastly, these aren’t actually on the CD but I might as well add a graduation photo and nice message that one of my friends, Justin, sent me. He was the only one to do so and thus the only one that I have preserved here. I also added pictures of my semi-rusted McNally year coin from 2000-2001 (previously posted in My Diary #013), and my McNally tiger tail bag tag/ornament (My Diary #014), which would have been somewhere from 2000-2002, and which I actually attached to my bag for a good many years after graduation, as I did actually like McNally overall, a lot more than I thought I would have coming over after the culture shock that was Vernon Barford and North American schools in general. I’d say that the high (Canadianized) Chinese population in the school helped me adjust to the place and society in Canada a lot quicker than I probably would have, and while I no longer keep in touch with any of them, I would consider some of them good friends if we were to ever meet again, and some of them do occasionally appear in my dreams. I also really liked quite a few of the teachers.
Document dated: June 2002.