During those moments when we’re applying some SPF-laden product on our skin we often recall that we’ve quite literally gotten burned in the past by failing to cover certain spots. The thing is, we often remember what some of them are, but it isn’t until it’s too late that we realize we didn’t catch them all.

Howstuffworks.com staff writer Molly Edmonds reported on the five spots we often miss when we’re putting on sunscreen and they bear repeating because even if you’ve always been somewhat diligent about lathering or spraying your own skin, you may find yourself struggling to be thorough if you happen to be a harried parent, uncle, or camp counselor with the unenviable task of applying and reapplying lotion on kids, especially kids in considerable quantities.

The five spots we often miss:

1) Behind the knees, where a burn can make every step torture.

2) Our feet, particularly the tops, since we as sunbathers often don’t want sand sticking to those areas; Edmonds says that “according to the American College of Foot and Ankle Surgeons, skin cancer on the foot often goes unnoticed because people don’t check their feet as diligently as they check other body parts.”

3) Our hands – again the tops of our hands and, interestingly, “UV rays can damage the fingernails,” Edmonds says.

4) The ears: Notes Edmonds, “skin cancer cells appear on all parts of the ear, including in the rims and bowls that may seem to be protected from the sun.”

5) The scalp. This is perhaps the hardest sell for coverage, especially if you have hair. Which is why those brazenly overpriced cans of spray sunscreen are worth having – misting your and your loved ones’ scalp is fairly effortless if you have one of those cans in hand.

Image source: Steve and Jem Copley via Wikimedia Commons

Ask a random bystander if he’s into online gambling and he might sniff that he doesn’t waste his money on games of chance. Ask him instead if he ever bought a refurbished piece of electronic equipment from an online retailer and he might say sure, from time to time. Well, newsflash, bystander, that’s online gambling.

Some online retailers will permit you to send back a refurb as easily as you would a new item, issuing you a magical RMA (return merchandise authorization, aka return material authorization). But just as often, you may find that your retailer’s policy is to replace your refurb rather than credit your original form of payment. A “with beans” correspondent recently tried to use a retailer’s online form to return a lousy refurbished phone and the knee-jerk response of the form was to spit back the response that an RMA could not be issued for the item. In so many words, the retailer’s was saying “Either keep your lousy phone or have us send you one that you now have reason to believe may suck just as much.”

Well, there’s a fiendishly simple way to get around that, and it comes down to three magic words: email or call the customer service department and say you understand the policy but that you see this as a customer satisfaction issue. Coolly dropping this phrase works almost every time, because linguistically and otherwise you’ve sidestepped the Draconian return policy and elevated your case to a realm that’s a bit more intangible. In the case of the bum phone, our correspondent sent an email with that phrase and within ten minutes got a response – by phone – from an apologetic rep who never once lectured him about the restrictive, stated return policy and graciously issued an RMA. That’s good news for you, very smart business for them.

Image source: Davide Vizzini via Wikimedia Commons

You feel like a hero carrying that bouquet of flowers down the street, don’t you, dude? How thoughtful everyone must think you are, including the bouquet’s recipient, until she wakes up the next morning to discover that you evidently didn’t buy these half-dead stems from the best of florists.

We’ve all been burned by flowers that die too fast, regardless of whether we’ve procured them from an expensive florist or the cheapo corner stall. And if you tend to frequent the latter, you likely aren’t getting comp packets of that powder that prolongs the life of fresh flowers. Well, if you want to be a hero for a bit longer, Lifehacker via myhomeideas.com zeroed in on a DIY powder mixture from the Brooklyn Botanical Garden that you can sprinkle into the flower vase: “mix 1 teaspoon sugar, 1 teaspoon bleach, and 2 tablespoons lemon or lime juice in a quart of warm water.”

If those fresh-cut flowers for your honey are perhaps a prelude to something more forever – a diamond in an engagement ring setting, say – withbeans has a bonus potion for you – a longtime jeweler recently shared his trade secret with us for making a diamond shine almost supernaturally: soak the little rock in a mixture with a teaspoon of bleach and a few spoonfuls of soap and water.

Longer living flowers, shiner diamond. Now, my friend, you’re a hero.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Late Hawaiian crooner Don Ho knew his signature tune “Tiny Bubbles” had the power to charm generations, but neither he nor the song’s fans were likely to surmise that tiny bubbles in the water might have the power to cool the earth. It took a Harvard physicist to clue us in about that.

Our friends at Gizmodo noticed that Slashdot chanced upon a Science write-up about physicist Russell Seitz, who suggested that pumping tiny bubbles into the Earth’s oceans would heighten the oceans’ reflectivity, thus bringing the water temperature down.

Per Gizmodo, “the tiny bubbles essentially act as ‘mirrors made of air,’ reflecting the sunlight and keeping oceans cool. Early simulations showed that bubbles could potentially cool the Earth by up to 3 degrees Celsius.” Scalability is one hurdle – it takes a fair amount of energy, or as Seitz suggests, perhaps “the energy output of 1000 windmills” to bubble up an ocean.

Another problem – obvious to a toddler with a bubble wand but again, it sometimes takes a Harvard physicist to cast these things in the proper context – bubbles don’t last very long. Seitz, via Science, notes “in nature, a bubble’s lifetime depends on the level of dissolved organic matter and nanoparticles, without which small bubbles rapidly shrink and disappear. If the water is too clean, the bubbles might not last long enough to be effectively spread over large areas.”

That said, it’s a grand idea. Summing up the possibilities of reflectivity with almost perfect elegance, Seitz explains “since water covers most of the earth, don’t dim the sun. Brighten the water.”

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

For the average consumer, going green can be a multi-part question: What green products can I introduce into my daily life, are they really making a difference when it comes to saving energy and the environment, and are these products any good? Answers to all of these questions intersect neatly in an unlikely place – an Amazon Listmania! List on the Best of Green Gadgets and Energy Savers.

A Listmania list can sometimes be self-serving affair constructed around the motivation of the lister – that’s not a cynical comment, it’s just the way it is, as all of the products on the list are for sale. But given that all Amazon reviews have user comments attached to them, the list begins to feel more objective.

The selling point of the green gadgets list, quite simply, is that it’s a good discussion starter for your household. Many of us know there are little ways we could be saving energy, but we’re not often armed with enough information about them. Did you know there was such a thing as a handheld electricity usage monitor that, according to the manufacturer, “shows the operating costs of your household appliances” and “calculates cost and forecasts by week, month and year”? Perhaps you heard tell of such a thing, but does it work? Two hundred customer reviews add up to a cumulative 4 ½ star rating, which, if you’re accustomed to relying on user reviews, is a good sign. The “works great, fast results” type of comment dominates, but look for yourself. As with any product, it’s the details, even within the positive reviews, that call the product’s usefulness for you into question.

Among the list’s items is one that’s decidedly old school –a classic push-reel lawn mower that users say is safer, quieter, and better for the environment. But in the words of one user it requires “a little more elbow grease” especially on hills. So you might want to ask yourself, is that additional exercise going to benefit you in the long term, or will it cause a strain? Hypothetical questions, of course, but all worth asking if you’re thinking about new ways to go green.

Image Source: P3 International

The idea of taking baby steps has been around for ages – for as long as babies, actually – but when you apply that idea to how to overcome shyness, taken up by personal growth writer Mark Harrison, it helps to know what those steps might be. The indefatigable Lisa Hoover at LifeHacker zeroed in on this point in her post about Harrison’s article, noting that one tactic for practicing your public speaking might be to “ask a question from the audience during your next company presentation, or vow to say hi to two new people at the next party you attend. It’s okay to be nervous—baby steps.”

Harrison goes well beyond the “imagine everyone in their underwear” trick to explore ways to build your confidence day to day. Repeating in the shower every morning that “you’re the man” may seem silly (especially if a person within earshot outside the bathroom asks later who you were talking to) but it goes to Harrison’s idea of using your subconscious to pump yourself up.

When it comes to public speaking, it helps to remember that your audience is going to respond to how seriously you take yourself, and Harrison observes that “shy people often take things far too seriously. So what if you make a mistake, if your voice trembles, if you forget your lines? So what if nobody laughs at your jokes? Is it going to kill you? I doubt it. Lighten up and keep things in perspective.”

Lightening up is easier said than done, but think about the presentations you’ve most admired. They probably haven’t been perfect, and somewhere along the line the speaker was probably a bit self-deprecating. Think about the whole notion of being up at the podium and your next thought suddenly going out of your head. Rather than putting your head down and standing in silence of twenty seconds, you might say, “Wow, my brain just shut down, give me a second to re-initialize” if you’re speaking to a techie crowd. Tweak it to your audience. You might change the line to “My mind just took a short vacation” if you’re addressing a roomful of travel agents.

You get the idea. Lightening up has almost nothing to do with the charisma of the speaker and almost everything to do with admitting your lapses to your audience – it’s something they can relate to, and thus an excellent way to connect with them.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) still generates enough buzz that CNET’s into its fifth year of nominating products for its Best of CES Awards, and among the gadgets that made the cut for its Best of CES 2010 round-up is the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid.

Hearing the word “hybrid” associated with a car may not immediately generate skepticism about whether and how well it works, but when it comes to smaller gadgets it’s a natural reaction, and CNET raises good questions about this notebook whose screen undocks from the keyboard “to become its own handheld Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered tablet.” CNET makes the point that a Lenovo rep demonstrated the undocking at the show, which makes the reviewers “curious as to how delicate the procedure is and whether the laptop might accidentally disconnect under casual use” and also wonder “will both devices sync well with each other? Will the battery life be suitable? None of these could be determined in the space of a few minutes.”

Those concerns aside, it’s hard to deny not only how cool this thing looks but how cool it would be to utilize it in a presentation if it actually works the way it should. CNET noted that the tablet’s touchscreen performance and video playback was a mixed bag, but the one feature to get excited about is that “the base, when detached, can continue to function as its own Core 2 computer independent of the tablet–a monitor would need to be attached, but it opens up possibilities for the U1 to truly act as two devices in one. Separate batteries and Wi-Fi antennas are contained in both the base and the tablet screen, while the tablet has the 3G and Bluetooth antennas, as well as speakers and a webcam.”

This kind of redundancy, we’ll say again, is exciting, especially when you consider how versatile the hybrid would be if, say, at a trade show you could easily attach another monitor to the U1’s keyboard to let your colleague continue demonstrating an app at your company’s booth while you ran off with the tablet to demo something else. Practically, it would probably be easier to have two separate devices, but that’s where the cleverness of the end-user comes in – how could having this undockable tablet really save me time and energy on a day-to-day basis? What do you think?

Image source: Lenovo

A splurge, almost by definition, is only a splurge if you don’t do it all the time. If you did, it would be something else – bankruptcy. But for many couples, there’s an insidious middle ground – that one-time splurge that begets other mini-splurges. Gadgets are prime examples. Buy a pricey one and soon your mind will drift to the gadget’s accessories. They’re not cheap, but their price points may be just enough below the radar that you don’t feel compelled to get your partner’s permission to buy them.

Adam Baker makes the latter point when discussing how he manages financial vices in his life, using as an example a martial arts class he takes to the tune of $168 a month. He notes that both he and his wife, Courtney, are on the same page about the expense: “Even though the training expense is for only me, I have Courtney’s full support. Without this type of support from a spouse or significant other, vices of this nature can stir up a ton of resentment.”

Being able to control the vice – going to the point about accessories, above – is also important, as is a notion in Baker’s article teased out by blogger Lisa Hoover about whether the purchase is consistent with your other goals. Baker observes that the cost of his class isn’t consistent with his household’s financial goals, but since the class helps him blow off steam, it has the ancillary benefit of helping him keep calm when he’s under pressure.

This whole notion of ancillary benefits is a slippery slope – almost every expense, good or bad, has an ancillary benefit – but the fact that Baker’s focusing on fitness makes his example accessible for a lot of consumers during these uncertain times. If your job was eliminated, do you cut the recurring fee for your gym membership out of your budget? Staying in shape during your job hunt seems like a good ancillary benefit, but couldn’t you stay in shape at a less expensive gym, or by running around the block? Baker’s points are an excellent starting place for these discussions, especially when confronting vices in your budget that weren’t necessarily vices last month when you had the income to support them.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons