Based on my experiences from the past few days, I have compiled a list of things that can go wrong while going to your circuit clerk’s office to submit some paperwork.

The first thing that can go wrong is that the receptionist who answers the phone when you call to check business hours has no idea what she is talking about, and tells you that the office is open the day after Christmas, even though Christmas was on a Sunday and the day after Christmas is Christmas Day Observed.

“We are open every week day.”

“Are you sure? Even though this coming Monday is the day after Christmas?”

“We are open every week day.”

“I am going to be very disappointed if you guys are not open.”

“We are open every week day.”

Guess what they were on the day after Christmas?

Closed.

Guess what I was?

Very disappointed.

Earlier today, I stopped by the office for my second attempt. Everything seemed to be going as planned, except for the fact that the circuit clerk’s office is so concerned about security that the only way to communicate with the person with whom you are working is to talk through a five-inch hole in a safety-glass panel and pass papers through a tiny slit towards the bottom of the panel.

Whoever built the glass panel apparently also thought it would be a good idea to make it soundproof as well, because I wasn’t able to hear half the things the receptionist was saying unless I shoved my ear directly up into the tiny hole.

After finally managing to marginally understand what she was saying, I figured out that I was apparently supposed to show more papers to a judge. Although I was slightly confused, I agreed and headed over to the court room.

After checking in with another receptionist, I was put into a waiting list along with other people who were waiting to see the judge for other random reasons.

The line seemed to be going relatively fast until a random old man started having issues.

Apparently, from what I was able to pick up, the issue was that the man didn’t comply with the requests of the security officials who were guarding the entrance of the building. Normally, you’re supposed to remove all items from your pockets and place them in a box, and take off all heavy outerwear, then walk through a metal detector while your belongings go through an x-ray machine (similar to what you do at an airport). Supposedly, the man thought it would be a great idea to not remove his jacket, even though he was told to multiple times.

After he was done wasting everyone’s time, two old women went up to the judge and started having another argument. Apparently, one of the old women’s daughters was supposed to show up to plead guilty or not guilty to a traffic violation she had received, but instead of showing up to court, her mother and her grandmother came on her behalf.

After another good handful of minutes of the judge explaining that the person who receives the violation must show up in court and there can be no substitutions, the old women finally gave up and the daughter was given another opportunity to show up to make her plea.

After over half an hour, it was finally my turn to spend five seconds giving the judge a sheet of paper.

Because I’m sure that story made you as frustrated as I was when I was in the circuit clerk’s office, here’s a random picture I took today of a tranquil lake to soothe your nerves.

If you visited my website earlier today, you might have noticed that it was hacked for a short period of time. Fortunately, I received a few emails letting me know, and I was able to investigate the situation immediately and get everything repaired within a few hours of the attack.

For those of you who missed it, all the content on my website was removed and replaced by the fol­low­ing message:

I did some thorough detective work with my friend who owns my website’s hosting company to find out exactly how this happened. One thing I immediately noticed was that all the pages of my website were being forwarded to a suspension page. After seeing this, I had a good feeling that it wasn’t me or my website that got directly hacked, but this was a result of my website’s host getting hacked.

Basically, what the hacker did was hack That Hosting and suspended all the accounts on the server. Then, the hacker set the suspension page to the message above, so it would look as if the hacker was able to hack every single website on the server individually. Once I figured this out, I knew that it would be an easy solution – just log in to the administrative control panel and unsuspend my account. Un­for­tunately, the hacker changed my password and the email address associated with it, so I wasn’t able to log in as an administrator.

I texted my friend, and after a short while, we managed to get everything sorted out and working back to normal. While my friend tried to figure out who the hacker was, I was more concerned about how the hacker gained access to That Hosting, so I traced recent activity on the server to find out what the hacker did. After a little bit of sniffing around, I was able to figure out exactly what the hacker did.

First, the hacker used a security flaw in Web Host Manager Complete Solution (WHMCS) to inject PHP code into our server via the support ticket system. For whatever reason, WHMCS thought it would be a good idea to let people use {php} to start PHP parsing in their ticket. The hacker injected an extremely long chunk of PHP code; a sample of what it looks like is shown below.

Once the support ticket was submitted, the injected code ran on the server and started creating files. When it was done executing, it sent a confirmation to the hacker with the following message:

The hacker could then navigate to the file specified in the confirmation message to find a file that would allow shell access via CGI. The hacker would log in with the password provided in the confirmation message.

Once logged in, the hacker would have complete access to the web server and be able to run any commands as desired. For those of you more familiar with Windows operating systems, this is basically like opening a command prompt and being able to type in whatever you want.

To demonstrate that this works, I ran a command to delete the xa7m3d.evil file (which was the CGI-Telnet file). After I submitted the command, no error messages appeared, which most likely means that the file was successfully deleted.

To confirm that the file was deleted, I refreshed the page, and got a 404 (file not found) error.

Thus, I was able to verify that the commands entered into this program ran successfully and the hacker could do whatever (s)he wanted with the server as long as (s)he knew what the proper commands to use were.

So what was I able to conclude from this? It’s clear that the hacker group 10:01 aren’t really hackers, but a bunch of people who search the Internet for programs and instructions they can use to hack other people. The only real hacker here is xa7m3d, who coded the actual tool and identified the PHP injection method that 10:01 used to hack into That Hosting.

So before you go around being a script kiddie and hack people’s websites, make sure that you only hack unexperienced people, because if you hack someone like me, I’ll call you out on my blog, explain exactly how pathetic you are, and tarnish your reputation.

For those of you who do not understand why that image is such a fail, examples of crustaceans are shrimp, crabs, and lobsters.

Not ants.

If you’ve checked out my profile page at all lately, you probably know that this is my second year attending my university.

Do you want to add another fun fact to your repertoire?

I still get lost.

For whatever reason, my sociological enterprise course decided that today would be a great day to meet at a random place called Memorial Library. From what I’ve heard in the past, Memorial Library is one of most famous and most used libraries on campus, next to another library called College Library. The only problem is just that – it’s used by too many other people. If you know me, you know that I like to stay in less-populated areas with less people around me, reducing the chance that someone will recog­nize me.

After I found out that my class was meeting there, I had no choice but to find out where this Memorial Library was. We were apparently going to learn how to use the library databases (which I already figured out how to do when I was in first grade in elementary school), but attendance was being taken for our participation grade, so I had to go.

To accompany my commentary, I put together this map:

The location circled in bright green is the building in which my sociological enterprise course normally meets. The location in the top left corner is where I was when I looked up Memorial Library on a map and tried to memorize its location. The pin labeled "A" is where Memorial Library is.

Yes. The red line is the path I took to get there.

Let the laughter begin.

While I was chatting with a buddy today, I mentioned that I would be right back because I was going to cook a pizza. My buddy asked if I had an oven in my studio, and I replied that I didn’t, and that I had a mini-oven. She was curious to see exactly how I cook a 12-inch pizza in a mini-oven, so here’s what I do.

First, I take out a pizza from my freezer and remove the packaging.

Next, I rip the pizza into four pieces. I rip it instead of cutting it with a knife because if I use a knife, I would have to wash it, and I want to minimize dishwashing.

After that, I take two of the chunks and place them on an oven plate such that the round portions are facing inward and the ripped corners are aligned with the edges of the oven plate.

Then, I stick the two chunks of pizza in the mini-oven and cook it for 10 minutes at 450°F/230°C.

Finally, after the first two chunks are done, I repeat the last two steps with the other remaining two chunks of pizza, this time cooking them for 9 min­utes.

My tendancy to come up with ideas on how to do everyday tasks with limited resources is how I’m able to live such a minimalist lifestyle.

If you’ve been a reader of my blog for the past year, you might possibly remember that I used to have a lot of fails with the bus a long time ago when I first started using public transportation.

For example, on the first day I ever rode a public bus, I failed to be noticed by the bus driver because I was standing at the wrong spot. A few days after that, I stood at a bus stop that was no longer in service because I misinterpreted the schedule and thought that late-night service was active on all days except Friday and Saturday nights, rather than only Friday and Saturday nights.

Today, I had a bus fail that, I believe, outfails all the other bus fails I’ve ever had in my life.

Today is Sunday, which means that the tae kwon do club at UW-Madison meets from 2 PM until 4 PM. Today also happens to be an early Sunday in September, which means that the qualifiers for the Ironman Triathalon is held in Madison, Wisconsin.

For those of you who don’t know, the Ironman Triathalon is an annual event where people swim 2.4 miles (3.86 km), bike 112 miles (180.25 km), and run 26.2 miles (42.195 km). Every year, iron men (and women) come to Madison, Wisconsin to compete in the qualifiers. For this event, there are tons of streets everywhere that are closed, and bus routes are rerouted so they don’t interfere with the participants.

Back to UW TKD. The tae kwon do club meets at the Gymnasium-Natatorium, which is quite a distance away from my apartment (nothing compared to the distance the Ironman competitors travel, but still too far for my walking comfort). So, I ride the bus from the Brogden Psychology Building up to the Gymnasium-Natatorium.

Sometime around 1:30 PM, I boarded the bus to go to the Gym-Nat. As I was riding the bus, I noticed that we were going to places that were not on the standard route. I assumed that it was because of the Ironman Triathalon and didn’t really think much of it, assuming that I would get to the Gym-Nat without a problem.

A while later, I realized that the bus was driving com­pletely around Observatory Dr., which is where the Gym-Nat is located. I became very much more alert to see where I was going, and realized that we were headed towards University Bay and UW Hospital.

After waiting a few minutes longer, I realized that I was now far northwest of the main UW campus and had no idea where I was going. Fortunately, I knew that the bus route I took travels in a circular route, so I knew that eventually I would end up back at a place with which I was familiar. But until then, I was stuck on a bus miles away from both my apartment and my destination.

After sitting on the bus for about 45 minutes and getting a tour of Eagle Heights and Picnic Point, I finally noticed that we were heading back to the main UW campus. As we approached the Brogden Psychology Building, I pulled the stop cable and got off the bus.

So yes, you read that correctly.

I got on the bus at the psychology building, stayed on the bus for 45 minutes, then got off the bus at the psychology building.

And I never made it to the Gym-Nat.

This is the third time in the past week or so that the Madison Metro system has miserably let me down.