Here is a graphical depiction of how to sync your Lotus Notes contacts with an iPhone or iPod Touch …

The whole purpose of this "experiment" was to keep my personal contacts in sync with my iPod Touch so I could then use Google Voice (aka GrandCentral) as my new telephone solution. This is part of the "one device to rule them all" challenge. Thus far, the iPod Touch is taking up the gauntlet very well. It now has control over the phone (calls, answering machine, and SMS), the music (my iTunes library, Genius playlists, Last.fm, ambient sounds, and alarm clocks), and video (movies, Hulu TV [experiment], and TV series on DVD).

As noted in my last post, I started playing around with iTunes “Genius” feature to generate some playlists. For me, as far as I can tell, given one for another, and not without consideration …. wait, I’m channeling Sir Humphrey again … What I’m trying to say is that my first four attempts have created some pretty good playlists.

I have not been an aficionado of the playlist. I’ve had an iPod for about 2 years and in all of that time, I have created one playlist or to be more specific a “not play” list – a list of everything but the songs I don’t want to hear much of the time. My standard operating procedure is to listen toe the iPod and keep hitting “next” when something comes up that is not right for the current mood.And  And that is the point – I don’t want playlists of artists as much as playlists that fit my mood. With Genius, I look for a song that fits my mood then tell Genius to go make a playlist of “stuff like this”. Like tonight, I heard Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah on TV. I have the song in a soundtrack and so I told Genius to make a playlist. It chose some interesting synonyms  but none were out of line. When I increased the playlist size from the default 25 to 50 and then 100, the mix got a bit more obtuse.

I’ve read that iTunes Genius does not do well at all when the root song is not available in the iTunes Store. The example I heard of was from the Beatles. I’ll have to try it with something like “I am the Walrus”. What would be interesting is to try it with both the original version and the one done by Jim Carry !

For those who fear “Google is to personal data thru search info as Apple is to personal data thru music info” they probably will not turn on the iTunes Genius playlist generator. But, what if you could turn it on and keep some level of personal privacy? Wait, you say, Genius needs an iTunes account and an iTunes account requires you give your credit card. The trick is creating that account without a credit card. You can’t do it if you try to open an account but you can do it if you try to download a free application from the App Store. This may all sound confusing but Efrum posted the “how to” over at Instructables.com. Once you have created an account, you can turn on Genius in iTunes, sit back a while while it collects data from your music and loads it to Apple’s servers.

I tested Efrum’s instructions and tested Genius. My first test yielded pretty good results and even found some music off of a few soundtrack and compilation “best of …” albums I had forgotten I even had. I don’t know if Genius will prompt me to buy more music from the iTunes store via "its suggestions. I have an aversion to DRM locked music. It may prompt me to pop over to Amazon.com’s music store for the same tracks DRM-free.

Vowe.net posted a cool YouTube video a while back. I forwarded it to a musician friend of mine. He in turn, tracked down the artist and an album with the track on it. Moments later, it was downloading to my iPod. (iTunes is just too handy!)

I forgot about it after a few days. Shuffle to the rescue – “Back to the Middle” just dropped in like a long lost platter on a juke box in your favorite neighborhood bar. The tune is still pretty cool <yeah>.

… wish I were sitting on that bar next to the fireplace enjoying a Macallan Sherry Oak 18 … <hmmm>

The latest firmware update for my iPod-5 (1.2.1) makes album artwork a valuable commodity. So, I let iTunes start to fix-up all my missing artwork from my CDs I’ve ripped over the past couple of years. (Turns out the new feature is for the “iPod Classic”, which, like Coke Classic, is newer than the “iPod” I have. Still, it’s good to have cover art for the playing song.)

One of the driving factors of all this “iPod” related stuff is that my job has changed for the short term and I writing code <ee-gad!>

“Shuffle” is my normal mode for my music. It’s only when I get really deep into coding that I drop to single genres. With the new “Cover Flow” view, it shows the current music as well as previous and next album covers.

Doug Wynne’s latest album Another Life just made another appearance. It wasn’t what I originally expected when I first got the release. I really don’t know what I expected. Like most good albums, I had to pay attention the first couple of times. It’s definitely growing on me with each track that shuffles by <cool>.