Missing Caption and Dialog Box Messages on Cairo-Dock

I've been using Linux Mint 17.1 for quite a bit and its configured to using the fglrx driver.  When I first installed Cairo-Dock as a way to emulate Ubuntu's Unity, there had been missing text and captions on several items in my menu.  It's bothered me but I've tolerated it for a long while till I had had enough and did some research on it.

This thread gave me a hint that this is a known issue and that setting the font may fix it.  The suggested font to use was Ubuntu Mono 12 but that didn't work in my case.

By right clicking the cairo-dock, you can configure the Dialogue Boxes and Captions.   You can set the custom fonts to use for both.  For my Linux Mint, the font that worked was Andale Mono 12.  Now all the text appears.

Some random ramblings...

If your Ubuntu desktop crashes and you lose all your desktop icons, open a terminal and run nautilus to bring it back.

If you have custom made .desktop launchers on the desktop, you can copy the files into /usr/local/share/applications so the Dash Home search can pick it up and execute them.

Where's Google Play Store??

Interesting problem last night.  One of the Android tablets we own had its Play Store missing from the app drawer page, which was just baffling to me.  Noting that the Play Store is a preinstalled, you can't just uninstall and zap it to kingdom come.  After poking around and even going as far as downloading an apk for the Play Store (which didn't work), it turns out there's an easy fix for this.

Go to Settings > Apps and tap the menu button (3 vertical dots).  Then check Show Google Apps.  Why is this even an option?