I'm alive, But I'm stupid

You may have heard recently about some really terrible earthquakes over here in Japan. Here are some facts:
-Honshu is the name of the main island here.
-I live on Honshu.
-The earthquakes centered around Niigata.
-That's, like, 100 miles from here.
-I'm fine.

We did have an earthquake here last Saturday, but it only lasted about 4-5 seconds and barely rumbled at all. Still weird, but it was over before I knew it.
That's the part where I am still alive.

Here's the part where I'm stupid:

So, last time I went to New York to visit with my dad, stepmom, and wee little brother my pops was kind enough to install McAfee on my laptop so I would have the double protection of a virus scanner and a firewall.
Well, for a couple months now I've been using Yahoo BB (BroadBand) here and I must say that the virus protection has been working like a charm. Yet, the popups were getting out of control and my internet speed just didn't seem to be what it used to be. I was beginning to think some spyware or adware had found its way onto my hard drive, and that was pretty well confirmed when half a dozen new icons appeared on my desktop suddenly. Sure, it's convenient to have a direct link to online gambling on your desktop but I thought the temptation would be too much. And the irony of having a spyware buster placed there by a piece of spyware was not nearly funny enough to leave it.

So, off they came and the very next thing I did was to download and run Spybot which eventually finished and let me know that there were something like 120 pieces of adware and spyware slowing me down. I got rid of them and things got much better but I was still confused. How did all of this get through that firewall? I mean, aren't they supposed to stop things like that? Hmmm...

So, I popped open McAfee and checked the firewall out. It gave me a cheery option screen and began guiding me through the process of setting up the firewall FOR THE FIRST TIME.

DOH!!!

As it turns out, I never bothered to turn on the firewall. I saw that Virus Scan icon in the system tray, knew they were the same program, and just assumed that... well, you know.

So, now that the firewall is on and working like a charm everything is working great. And since the earthquake didn't destroy my laptop I'm back to downloading movies and TV shows in a perfectly legal manner! Whee!