Recompiling the Kernel aka Installing Half-Life 2

Sit down and listen to my tale of woe, my loyal readers.

Last night at around 6:30-7ish I was installing Half-Life 2. It's not a small game. In fact, it clocks in at around 4.5 GIGS when you add in the Counterstrike stuff. I decided that since the likelihood of my playing Counterstrike was about the same as Julie playing Grand Theft Auto, I wouldn't bother wasting the time and hard-drive space installing it.

Bad move.

On disc 4 of 5, I suddenly get an error stating that there was an installation error and the program just shut down. This had taken me about an hour or so of time to get this far, so I wasn't terribly happy.

It turns out there's a glitch which causes the install program to crash if you don't install Counterstrike. So I had to restart the whole process again. This went off without a hitch and I watched last week's ER with Julie while it installed.

So around 11pm I figure I can finally try this game out. All I have to authenticate it with the Valve servers. This shouldn't take too long, I think. I thought wrong.

First off, the progress bar was possessed. I'd be at 34% complete, then suddenly 16%, then 48% and so on. It made NO sense.

After close to an hour of this, I was convinced that I was either recompiling the WinXP kernel or my computer was being used to hack into the NSA mainframe.

When I was finally at about 50-60% complete, Steam just crashed. Locked up. No worky. This was after midnight now. I'd been trying to get the game working for upwards of 4-5 hours now.

Suffice it to say several explitives were hurled at my computer, the internet and any of my buddies online who were unfortunate enough to be talking to me at the time.

I restarted the whole authentication process again and this time it seemed to be working, but I didn't feel like spending another hour or so watching a progress bar creep up, so I just went down and played some Metroid Prime 2.

Luckily everything was hunky-dory when I came back up around 1-2ish and the game is great, but man, what a bunch of hoops to have to hop through.