In any case, there apparently was another person on the planet who was looking for that song. The first thing she did is google the lyrics, like I had done. Except this time, she found something: My post. She contacted me and I was puzzled that someone from the US had also heard that song, which to my knowledge had only been used in this French version of a late 80s skateboarding video.

She said she’d heard that song in the Barbie Fashion Show video game. She quickly looked up the credits and found out the song had been licensed by DeWolfe Music. I contacted them, and eventually found a person kind enough to send me a link to the song.

Thanks to all of my friends (and their friends, and their friends’ friends…) who helped me in this quest. And many thanks to the person who heard that song in the video game, without her, I would still be looking for it for a long time I’m sure.

And even if it’s a bit old now, I can’t get tired of Bill Maher’s New Rules on French:

Après quelques recherches sur Google, apparemment plusieurs personnes étaient tentées de faire la même chose, mais point de solution.

Voici donc ma méthode, soit un peu sale, mais qui marche.

En examinant le source du player de la radio, on observe que le flux radio provient de cache.yacast.fr/V4/skyrock/skyrock.asx. En analysant le contenu de cet objet ASX, on peut récuperer le lien vers l’objet player lui-même:

L’objet est donc à la première URL, la deuxième n’étant là qu’en cas de problème avec la première. Ouvrir l’URL mms://vipmms9.yacast.net/encoderskyrock directement avec iTunes ne marche pas. Le mieux est de télécharger VideoLan pour ouvrir cette adresse :

Le flux prend un peu de temps à se bufferiser, mais la radio devrait marcher. Maintenant, sauvez le fichier avec File > Save Playlist en format Extended M3u. Ensuite, ouvrez ce fichier avec le Quicktime player et sauvez-le en skyrock.mov. Finalement, copiez skyrock.mov dans la bibliothèque de iTunes et voilà !

“Turn it up loud, radio radio
Out in the crowd, on my radio
Say it out loud, the music is my friend
On my radio”

I’ve asked almost all of my friends about it, no one has ever heard it.  I’ve even tried Yahoo, Lycos, Ask.  No luck.

So I’m now hoping the wisdom of the crowds can help.  I’ve become a bit obsessed about this quest I must admit, so I will send $100 via Paypal to the first person who sends me the details of the song in the video sequence below.  I will of course post a follow-up if this approach is successful, so feel free to forward to your friends, the deal is on!

About six months ago, as I was getting ready for work, a then-unknown singer’s latest song was playing on TV5. The tune was catchy, fairly different from the usual crap, and the rhetoric caught my attention too. The song was “J’écris faux, je chante de la main gauche“.

I went about my day and forgot about it. Yet, a couple of weeks ago I googled it to find out who the singer was. His name turned out to be Benoît Dorémus, someone I had never heard of–which is not surprising in itself by the way as I usually don’t listen to any French music that was created after 1993, except for a couple of exceptions.

I ended up on Benoît’s website where you can actually listen to his entire album. The comparison with Renaud is obvious and makes sense since Benoît was produced by “l’homme au foulard“. Ten minutes into the album, I had to buy it (the iTunes store is quite handy for such compulsive buying cases). It was everything I was hoping for and more. His lyrics are witty, his music simple and popular. Whoever loved Renaud in the 80s will undoubtedly enjoy Benoît’s album. I particularly recommend “Un arracheur de sacs”!

This was rare enough to be blogged about. It gives me hope for France’s art scene renewal.

On that topic, a friend of mine, Cyrielle, was visiting last week and she’s toying with the idea of acting in the US so as promised, here’s her short bio in case anyone is interested.

As a note, I spoke about Google Gadgets and AdWords API on Witamine, a French webradio. I hope the talk was interesting, I pretty much condensed in 10 minutes what I said at the GDD for those who unfortunately could not attend that event.

I also received an invitation to Wallop from Régis Gaidot (thanks Régis!). That is pretty cool, I didn’t even know about this. I played a little bit with it but plan on spending more time on it once I get back to NYC. This is a very rich community site with all of the features one could expect, but presented in a very high-tech, Flash-required fashion.

Technorati Tags: gdd07, gdd07fr

I arrived at the Bastille Design Center pretty early, around 9AM as the numerous teams were busy working on getting the place ready for the event. I sat down for a while, enjoying the beautiful space eating a pain au chocolat, and then browsed my presentations once again, to kill time.

Patrick Chanezon arrived second and since we don’t meet as often as we wish (he being in Moutain View and I in New York), we spent a good hour catching up on things. By noon, everybody from Google had arrived, the place was all set up and we all got some quick lunch. Then for the next hour, we tried out our wifi connections, video feeds, etc.

At 1PM, the place opened and it took more than an hour to get everybody in. Very strict process, people had to provide official ID and a matching invitation, or wouldn’t be let in.

Sandrine kicked off the event at around 2:30PM and Mats gave a quick overview of Google France and our collaboration with the developers community. Nice to get the big boss to come and talk.

Patrick gave the first presentation about multiple Google APIs. I watched most of it, Patrick is a great speaker and has been doing this for year — which might explain why Google gives him a salary for doing it

Before he was done, I was getting ready for the Gadgets presentation. I put on a black Google NYC t-shirt and went on stage. The presentation was probably about 40-min long and hopefully interesting, but I’ll leave this up to bloggers. It was followed by a 10-min Q&A session where I handed out Google NYC t-shirts for questions. The audience was very involved, knowledgeable and fun. I had a good 20-min long follow-up session with participants. The presentation is below:

I then hung out a while to chat with developers, a guy from neteco.com interviewed me about the AdWords API. I was chatting with more developers and eating a jambon-beurre when Thomas and Sandrine rushed to me saying I was late for the API session! I ran down to the lower ground and, with my mouth still half full, proceeded with the presentation. I hope people forgave me for this. The presentation follows:

After all the sessions were finished, a lot of people stayed until about 10PM to discuss with all of us, it was a great time all around. The remaining Googlers all went out for a late dinner and I was back in my hotel room around 1AM. I already had received some great feedback about the Developer Day from people I had met during the day, so if I don’t answer to you right away, please give me a little time, but I will!