I attended NAIT, or the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, for one year, from Fall 2005 to Spring/Summer 2006. Apparently in Fall 2005 that year, NAIT also gave all incoming students a 256MB USB stick, branded with the NAIT logo on it, called the OokSTICK, and they apparently did it again in 2006. You can read a bit about it here on this blog (local), which links to this site and then this site and even as far as this site. I was, however, unable to find any downloadable copy of the OokMAG, either the 2005 or the 2006 version, on archive.org itself. (The Ooks are what they call NAIT students, it’s the school nickname, which is where names like OokSTICK and OokMAG came from.)
I do actually have the 2005 version archived in my digital file stash though, so I thought I would break it out and upload it here for public archival’s sake. I can’t actually run the .exe file that it came with, so I cannot actually see the “40-page electronic publication loaded with information about life at NAIT” and the “virtual tours, program details, athletics, and other fun stuff”, but the data’s in the zip file below so if someone else wants to install Windows 98 and other appropriate software on a virtual machine and attempt to boot it up that way, they can.
What I can do though, is upload the videos and picture files that were actually accessible through just browsing the thumb drive like a normal human being. I have uploaded the pictures below, with each (low-rez) picture captioned by its actual filename which shows what sort of building or location each picture was supposed to represent. There were also three videos on the thumb drive and all three have been uploaded (not publicly) to YouTube as well and linked below. There are also .swf files that are probably mini 3d tours of the various locations, but I couldn’t actually play them on my media player. Those are included as-is in the zip file below, though.
Anyway, the .zip file of the Fall 2005 NAIT OokMAG, our “NAIT Student Virtual Magazine”, can be downloaded here.
This page was written on Sep 17 2022. For any comments, email jesskitten at gmail. If you happen to have the 2006 OokMAG, feel free to send it my way too and I will unpack it and upload it to my blog as well.
Videos
This isn’t a particularty complex page so it probably doesn’t actually requires Table of Contents and headers, but… too late. First up, there were three videos on this USB drive. Their names, in order, are welcome.flv, encana.flv, and athletics.flv. They are linked in that order as follows.
Welcome.flv features Dr. W.A. Sam Shaw, who was NAIT‘s president from 1997 to 2010 or so.
Encana.flv features a number of students talking about the school, and particularly about the EnCanada Aboriginal Student Centre. Just to break out their names and make them Googleable, they are: Krista Montour, Conrad Young, and Benjamin Wilson. All from the School of Business for some reason. They mention someone called Adrian Abraham, who was in their Construction Engineering program, but they didn’t interview him. There’s also someone who looks like a director near the end of the video, but is unnamed, before it cuts to Dr. Sam Shaw again at the very end. The overall female narrator also seems to be uncredited.
Athletics.flv is a longer video by the Campus Sport & Wellness program. It starts with an interview with Dianna Paton, the Campus Sport and Wellness Program Head. It shows the fitness centre, exercise studio, and other sports facilities on the campus. Water basketball sounds interesting to watch. After the narrated tour, they interview Trever Turner, the Intramural Coordinator, and Gregg Meropoulis, the Athletic Director. The narrator is uncredited again.
Pictures
I think these pictures are just thumbnails of the virtual tours available on the full CD, but that’s fine! They’re really low-rez, so I’ve just dumped them all into a gallery. As mentioned earlier, the caption for each picture is taken from the actual file name of the picture file.
(Where is trailer1.jpg? why is SouthCampus labelled as SouchCampus? Why are some things uppercase and other things lowercase? Aaaah.)
My classes were in the HP Centre (hp centre? It was actually lowercase?), and I honestly barely had any time or opportunity to really visit any of the other buildings on campus. It was a rather strenuous and fast-paced year. I did get the sense that it was a very big and quite beautiful campus though, though it seemed to lack greenery the way that the U of A campus has, at least from what I remember of the area i was in.
Misc
Although there’s nothing in here right now, I am pretty sure that I still have the actual USB drive itself in a box somewhere, and I’m leaving this section here for when I find the stick and can take a picture of it.
Document dated: September 2005.