Settings –> Appearance –> Theme –> Change from Ambiance to Radiance

This change also added extra icons to the top menu and provided actual pictures for the “Settings” and “Trash” buttons on the side menu. With the Ambiance theme, these were all blank.

Hope this helps!

1. Turn the phone off.
2. Turn it back on and hold the “up” volume button.

Pretty easy, but it seemed to work for her.

Hope this helps!

“The process android.process.acore has stopped working.”

The solution:
Settings –> Applications –> Manage Applications –> All (button on the top that lets you see all applications) –> scroll down to “Contacts Storage” –> Click on “Clear Data”.

This worked on my Android TV and I have seen reports of it working on other Android devices.

DISCLAIMER!!!
I do not have any contacts stored on my Android TV, so this solution did not cause any problems with my device. If you are using a contacts list on your device, I cannot say whether this will cause problems with your list of contacts. If you think it might, please look for another solution. (If anyone is brave enough to try it anyway, please let me know!)

Fast forward six months to early December 2010.

When I left my house to go to work one December morning, I noticed a dog that looked an awful lot like the same dog sleeping in the former neighbour’s yard. Since I had taken some pictures of him in the summer, I compared him to the pictures and, sure enough, it was the same dog. I called the real estate agent to get in touch with my former neighbours, and after a great deal of time, I finally found out that they had asked someone to look after the dog, but that it had run away and returned to its former home. I’m not sure whether that story is true or not, but it is clear that they didn’t have any intention of looking after the dog anymore. They had moved to an apartment building and there was no way for them to keep the dog. They offered to take him to the pound (which would mean that he would die within one week), but I refused to let that happen. So, now I am the proud owner of my former neighbour’s dog, whose name was Fugu (but who was renamed “Richard The Lionheart” soon after he adopted me).

When I checked his records at the city hall, I was told that my neighbours had registered their ownership of a dog named Fugu who was born in 1999. They also said that the dog was a Shih Tzu (which Richard is not), but I assumed that was a clerical error. I also asked some of my current neighbours and they agreed that Richard had been around for a long time, so I just assumed that he was around 11 years old.

When I took him to the vet, I was told that he had heartworm and that there was nothing that could be done about it. I figured that he was old and sick and probably wouldn’t last out the year. During the summer months, I gave him heartworm prevention medicine, but other than that I didn’t treat his sickness.

I had to bring Koi, my cat, to the vet last night for her shots, so I thought I would bring Richard along for a second opinion. His coughing was getting really bad and I had run out of the preventative medicine, so I thought I would give it a shot. (I brought Richard to the closest vet to my house originally, but Koi has been going to a vet in Ninomiya since before I moved to this new place, so her vet is different.) My cat’s vet took one look at Richard and said that there was no way he was 11 years old. She thought maybe he was more like 7 or 8 years old. She also said that there was a treatment for heartworm, but that it was expensive, so I had to decide if I could pay for it. He would need an x-ray, ultrasound, and a blood test to figure out the best treatment. If he is determined to be a good candidate for treatment, he would have to take three different pills for about two years. One of the pills will hopefully kill the worms and the other two pills will protect his organs so that he can live long enough for the other pill to work.

I don’t know all of the details of the costs, but there is no way I want Richard to suffer if he doesn’t have to. It is heartbreaking to watch him cough. When I told my friends about this development, they told me to figure out a way for them to donate towards Richard’s medical fees so that he could get the treatment he needs. I am a bit embarrassed to ask for money for this, but it certainly will help me out. I will keep track of his medical bills and if the amount I receive is more than his bills cost me, I will donate the extra to Japan Earthquake Animal Rescue and Support, which is a group that is doing amazing work up north in the tsunami- and radiation-affected areas of Japan.

Here is a ChipIn widget that you can use to donate towards Richard’s medical bills.

I’ve never done this before, so I’m not sure if it is going to work smoothly. Fingers crossed!

Richard and I thank you very much. (Koi begrudgingly does too.)

To be honest, I was scared of doing it. I knew that it involved squishing my breast, but I didn’t really know how it would work. I thought that I would have to squish my chest flat against a panel or something like that – like a chest x-ray – but that was not the case.

What happened was that I took my bra and shirt off and stood in front of a machine. The machine had an arm with a sideways C-shaped part on the end that flipped around. (Think of the C as more boxy than this letter C – like a square with one open side, or the katakana character for ko –> コ.) The nurse had me stand up at the mouth of the C, with my right arm resting on the top of the sideways C (which contained a panel with a film). My right breast was pressed against the inside of the top part of the C. The nurse then — not very gently — pushed and squished my breast against the top arc of the C and then maneuvered the bottom part of the C (which was a clear, plexiglass plate) so that it pushed on the other side of my breast. (Okay, if you are not getting all this talk of Cs, just think of a trash compactor in a scary movie. My breast was pressed up against one wall while the other wall came up against it on the other side.) After they did the right side, they flipped the C over so the film was on the left side side and then pressed the plexiglass plate up against the right side of my left breast. Actually, I forgot to mention that they did my right breast once, but the machine wasn’t working properly, so they had to do it again. The poor nurse was very apologetic.

I was afraid that it would hurt, and it did, but it was more like “major discomfort” than actual pain. And it only lasted a few seconds (although it felt longer). I would definitely not be afraid of doing it again. It was much less painful than I thought. I realized I was mainly scared because I didn’t know what would happen more than anything else, so I decided to write about my experience so other women (and men) would not use fear (especially fear caused by ignorance — which is the most dangerous kind of fear) as an excuse not to have a checkup.

I got to look at the scans when they were done, but I didn’t get to hear the results. They will be sent to me by post. I should get them in a couple of weeks.

Here are some breast cancer statistics. Note that heredity is not as strong a factor as you might think, so don’t decide not to have a mammogram just because no one in your family has had breast cancer.
http://www.breastcancer.org/symptoms/understand_bc/statistics.jsp

The (US) National Cancer Institute recommends that women over 40 (who are not in any high risk categories) get mammograms once every one or two years.
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/detection/mammograms

I hope that those of you who are 40+ will read this and make an appointment for a mammogram today. It doesn’t hurt as much as you might think and it doesn’t take a lot of time. Don’t let fear or laziness prevent you from taking care of yourself.

I started to compose this poem as I was volunteering up in Ishinomaki. The phrase “all the pretty things” kept floating through my mind every time I saw something that was clearly meant to make life more beautiful and enjoyable lying in the mud. It gave me a very confused feeling about whether I should be more upset about the pretty things that are now so symbolic of an ugly time, or the useful things that no longer serve a purpose, or the lives that have been broken, or lost. It’s so confusing to try to work out what to think and how to best help the people who are suffering. It’s also hard to find meaning in all of this. The amount of destruction is unfathomable. It makes watching movies about destruction less enjoyable. It doesn’t make any sense to try to figure out why it happened, but I think it’s a human habit to try to make sense of it all.

This poem still doesn’t say exactly what I am trying to express, but it’s a start. I’m not sure if I will ever be able to process all of it, let alone find a way to explain it all even to myself. I thought I would share it, though, in case it makes sense to anyone else.

Tell Me

Should I be upset
At all the pretty things
All the pretty things
Lying broken in the mud
Tell me what should I feel now

Should I be annoyed
At all the useful things
All the useful things
Stilled forever by the sand
Tell me how can I protest

Should I be afraid
Of all the toxic things
All the toxic things
Hiding layered in the soil
Tell me when will it be safe

Should I become unwound
By all the things I see
All the things I see
Nothing like it was before
Tell me why it must be so

Should I bow my head
Should I give up and run
Should I give in to fear
Or should I turn and face the sun
Tell me where to go from here

Hello everyone,

Thank you for your kind words of support during this difficult time.

Life has slowly started to return to normal here. We have decided to re-open our school on Tuesday, March 22. (Monday is a national holiday.) We believe that the situation with the nuclear power plant is well under control and that since we are 170km from the reactors, we are not in the danger zone anyway.

A lot of you have been asking me about ways that you might help with the situation in Japan right now. One thing that you could help me with right now is getting the word out to your friends and families that what you are seeing and hearing on the news is NOT THE SAME as what is actually happening here. Due to language barriers (not many English speakers understand Japanese) and the time difference, many news reports that are being broadcast abroad are not only old, but grossly inaccurate. There was no time when this problem with the reactors looked like Chernobyl. We are not facing Armageddon and the total destruction of an entire country. I wish that I had’ve thought to take regular videos of what was going on and posted them to my blog so my friends and family could see the phenomenal and inspiring resilience of the Japanese people throughout this entire ordeal. Not only do they keep their heads cool, but they also fail to complain about being asked to sacrifice even more (for example when we were all asked to turn off our heaters last night despite the cold in order to conserve energy and avoid a massive, unplanned blackout). Do they mention that on CNN?

The reason that this is a problem is because the foreign media have been fear-mongering rather than reporting, and they are actually making things worse rather than better. Because of their lazy researching and failure to comprehend the full story, they have scared several countries/embassies into issuing “flee orders” to their citizens. You might think that it was a good idea for the embassies to do so, but the problem was that the timing was all wrong. The embassies issued the order AFTER the brunt of the crisis was over and people were starting to rebuild their lives. This had the effect of making countless able-bodied people flee the country, rather than come together and work on the difficult, but important, task of rebuilding.

I would also like to clarify that we are getting a great deal of detailed information here about the reactors and the other problems that Japan is facing. The foreign media is accusing the Japanese government of hiding information, but the problem is not with the Japanese government hiding information, it’s with the foreign media, not being fluent in Japanese, not UNDERSTANDING the information. This is an important distinction and one that I hope the media take some time to reflect on in the future. For example, in the past few days, I have personally located near real-time hourly radiation level updates on probably two dozen different sites in and around Fukushima. Did I have to badger the government to get this information? NO. I downloaded it from the internet. All the information anyone would want to see, out in the public, for everyone to download, free of charge. Uh huh. Either the Japanese government has fundamentally misunderstood the rules of hide and seek, or maybe there is a different reason why Mr. Joe Reporter didn’t get that monitoring data. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that our Mr. Joe here doesn’t even SPEAK the language of the country that he is reporting on.

Japan is a sovereign, first-world nation that is very capable of handling itself with decorum and dignity in a crisis. It has its own experts and its own capacity to pull itself up by its bootstraps and face down a problem. The world community needs to respect that. If your own country were facing a disaster on the scale of this one, would you want your leaders to spend all their time explaining their actions one-by-one IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE to people in other countries? Or would you, perhaps, prefer it if the other countries kept their opinions to themselves and offered their support and aid rather than rhetoric and vitriol?

I would just like to speak a bit more about the scale of this disaster. On the morning of Friday, March 11, Japan was a country like any other you might visit, with people going to and from work and making plans to hang out with their friends on the weekend. By evening, however it no longer remotely resembled the nation that it was earlier in the day. Whole systems such as public and private transportation, public utilities (water, gas, electricity), and the entire commercial and industrial sector were in turmoil. The earthquake that kicked off the show was larger than any other earthquakes that have hit Japan in living memory. The catastrophic tsunami that followed caused the kind of wide-scale and total destruction that you would find hard to look at in a movie, let alone face in real life. In the days that have followed, while Japanese people are struggling to regain their former lives, the country faces serious power shortages, water and food shortages, and gas shortages. Add to that the threat of a nuclear explosion.

No, really, add it all up.

9.0 earthquake + tsunami + Level 4 nuclear accident + gas shortages + food and water shortages + power failures + total stoppage of trains + total blocking of roads and highways + large, dangerous aftershocks that continue to grumble a week later + economic instability = ???

Now ask yourself how your country’s government would handle this situation. Do you believe that your country could do a better job of of keeping 127 million people safe and secure under those conditions? Would they do the right thing and make the right decisions every step of the way?

No, they would not.

And would it help if other countries, whose languages and cultures were different enough from yours to make communication difficult, decided to pick that time to argue about how the country handled any ONE of those crises?

No, it would not.

And, for my final act, I would like to ask you, have you seen any scenes of looting and violence in the aftermath of all of this destruction?

No, you have not.

The reason that things are already going so well in Japan now (and YES, they are), despite the continuing aftershocks, despite the threat of a nuclear accident, despite the shortages, is because Japanese citizens are honest, hard-working, principled, intelligent, and above all resilient people. And their government tends to be the same.

So before you turn on the TV and stare in morbid fascination at the latest picture of horror and destruction being repeated on an incessant loop on CNN, please ask yourself how that is helping you and your fellow countrymen be a part of the solution, rather than a part of the problem.

I would like to end this little outburst by asking you to consider the original question.

How can you help the people of Japan right now?

Think about what I have said and how much of this was told to you in your 3 minute “news report” on the situation in Japan. If you feel that you maybe didn’t get the whole picture, perhaps you would like to consider more carefully who, indeed, might be responsible for “hiding information”.

They are currently trying to raise money to buy more cat food for the winter months. They are running a sponsorship drive, but they are also accepting donations of cat food and money to be put towards cat food. The details of their current drive are here.

http://www.japancatnet.com/rescue/2010winterfood.html

Their main website is here.

http://www.japancatnet.com/

And you can find information about other ways you can help here.

http://japancatnet.com/blog/you-help-jcn/

If you like to donate money at this time of the year and you are looking for a worthy cause, I would recommend Japan Cat Network as a good recipient of your charity. I guarantee they will put your money to good use.

Teaser
Evelyn Lau, at the age of 14, decides to leave home in order to get away from her repressive parents whose unreasonable expectations are crushing her. She starts off living with friends, but eventually spends most of the next two years in shelters, foster homes, and on the streets. She quickly learns how to make “easy” money through prostitution to support her drug habit. The book is a diary that Lau kept while she was on the streets, and it holds very little back in the descriptions of life on the streets as a teenager. It is very hard to predict whether Lau will survive the experience, or whether this eloquent, though excruciating, book will end with a terse epilogue written by one of her social workers.

Review
This is not an easy read. Lau takes us through every step of her painful spiral into homelessness, drugs, and prostitution. She battles a range of demons — both real and imagined — during her time on the streets, but it is her struggle with herself that is most heartbreaking to witness. “I could become one of the top writers in Canada, or I could be a drug addict, or I could die. Those are the choices.” Young adult readers, who may wonder what it would be like to run away, will certainly get a good taste of the reality of living on the streets. The book works as both a cautionary tale, although readers will likely agree with Lau’s reasons for wanting to escape, and a source of hope for those who are facing similarly desperate odds. This is an important and unique look into the life of a trouble, though highly intelligent, teen and is recommended reading for anyone who wants an inside look into the mind of a young adult on the street.

If I were to use the VOYA scale, I would give it a 3P (moderate appeal) and 4Q (high quality). The heavy nature and graphic detail of this book means that it will not have as wide appeal as some of the lighter books out there, but it is an important addition to any young adult collection.