At work we use IRC to communicate. It’s an old technology, but it’s really awesome. I’ve come to think of IRC as my home base. It’s the place where I chat with my colleagues across the globe and get to enjoy their company. With distributed work, it’s the best way to feel connected with people.

Because it’s my home base, I’ve always wanted to make it mine. I’ve made a few tweaks here and there, but I realized quickly that the only way to truly customize it is to write a script.

A friend of mine at work loves burritos. Every Friday (I suppose, out of companionship,) we have what’s called Burrito Friday. That means that no matter where you are in the world, you eat a Burrito of some kind. I personally don’t have too many options for Burritos in Philly, so I’ve decided that Burrito Friday is a state of mind. That means that anything that I eat on Friday is a Burrito. My friend hates that.

He hates it so much that I just can’t stop giving him a hard time about it.

What’s the point of giving someone a hard time if you have to do it manually? So I wrote a script¹ to do it for me. Now all that I have to do is type /burrito in Linkinus to give him a hard time.

To use this yourself, open up your AppleScript Editor and create a new document with the code below. Save the file as burrito.scpt to /Users/USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Linkinus 2/Scripts

-- --------------------------------------
-- Burrito Friday
-- by Alx Block
-- Version 1.0
-- Description: Automatically insert sentances claming that anything is a Burrito
-- Usage: /burrito
-- Output: [burrito]
-- -------------------------------------

on linkinuscmd()
	set burrito_list to {"Everything is a beautiful Burrito", "My desk is a Burrito", "This pencil right here is a Burrito", "Today is Friday, so that means that your mom is a Burrito", "My MacBook Pro is a Burrito", "Only at Automattic can anything be a Burrito", "I'll admit that my trackpad is a Burrito", "This monitor right here is a Burrito", "The Bagel that I had this morning was a Burrito", "This baby monitor right here is a Burrito", "The salad that I'm eating is a Burrito", "This coffee is a Burrito", "I got you a Burrito", "I'm sorry, but you've never had a real Burrito", "I was eating an egg and all that I could think about was that it's a Burrito", "My kid. A Burrito!", "The sun is out, so it's a Burrito", "Have you ever had a frozen Burrito?", "There's no such thing as a Burrito. Only ZUUUUULL", "Burrito? Where we're going, we don't need Burritos", "My motorcylce is like a fancy Burrito", "I'm wearing a Burrito costume", "You're a real Burrito", "I hear that all of the Northeast is a Burrito", "Have you ever even had a real Burrito?", "This muffin is a Burrito", "Twitter is a Burrito", "Once a Burrito, always a Burrito", "My dog ate my Burrito", "I think IRC is also a Burrito"}
	set the list_count to the count of burrito_list
	set pick to random number from 1 to list_count
	set result to item pick of burrito_list as string
	
	return result
end linkinuscmd

The beautiful thing about this is that it’s super-simple. This is such a basic script, but it allows me to customize my home base in a way that’s meaningful to me. I’m excited to try more things and see what I can come up with next.