My Superhero Ideas

I had an idea for a superhero once. I noticed that many modern superheroes relied more on circumstantial cellular reactions than technology and gear. Superman? Gets his powers from Earth's Sun. Fantastic Four? Cosmic radiation. Incredible Hulk? Radiation. Third-tier anti-hero The Punisher? Merely shoots people. Contrast and compare, kids. The biggest name in the "normal boys with expensive toys" theme is Batman. Batman has lots of fun toys, but they don't define him. He's defined by a debilitating mental disorder and an affinity for shadows.

So I resolved to go back to the Silver Age and create a character who had no other better qualifications than the fact he owns some neat machine that nobody else has. Say, for instance, a jetpack. He was The Hummingbird, a cross between The Flash and The Rocketeer, and wholly resolved to being an excuse to give a guy a bomber jacket, a ruby-colored scarf, and a frickin' jetpack. Old school, indeed.

But that wasn't all. Later on I fumbled around with a Simpsons-style Milhouse/Biclops love affair where I worked on the idea of a superhero who reflected elements of my own life writ large: The Sysadmin. His superpower? He's ripped like Mr. Universe and has a GSM phone that can get him an SSH session anywhere in the world. Oh, and he keeps a Leatherman and a cable crimper on his tool belt. I never figured out quite how any of this would help him fight crime, so The Sysadmin was relegated to the same dust bin that holds Aqua Teen Hunger Force's Master Shake's own The Drizzle.

Here's another idea I'll never be able to solidify: The Commando. The Commando lives the life of a normal, mild-mannered Windows user by day. But by night, he opens up a command-prompt window and does everything and everything from inside an 80x24 window. He wears a mask because he can never let his coworkers know that his favorite mail program is "telnet mailserver 25". The Commando will swing into an office, hit Windows+R, type "cmd", and fix the problem, whatever it may be, without having to touch the mouse. (He may, however, use it briefly to push the mouse cursor out of his way on the screen.)

The idea arose because I was having a hard time wiping a 54 MB file from my hard drive for some strange reason. I've probably blogged about Eraser 5.7 before, but it's been long enough that I should probably mention it again. Eraser is a Windows tool that securely wipes data. Ordinarily, when you delete a file, Windows simply marks the space that that file occupies as being safe to overwrite with new data. It does this because it is soooo much faster to just unlink a file in this manner than it is to go through the entire length of the file and write zeroes all over it.

Eraser has a context menu that I usually use. Highlight the file, right-click, select "Erase", and go on with your life. For some bizarre reason, this isn't working on my Win2K box today, so I put "C:\Program Files\Eraser" into my PATH environment variable and tried the command line version of the software.

C:\>eraserl -file some_file.txt -method "Random" 1 -results

Fast and furious, this method has worked when the GUI won't.