A random competition arose with an IM contact where we’d greet eachother not with the standard ‘hello’, ‘roflmao’ etc, but with an all-caps word beginning with P. The more obscure, the better. Being a nerd, and moreso liking to one-up people, I wrote this simple script and had Pidgin trigger it when that contact came online. Said contact thought it was hilarious and spent all morning logging on and off.

Select a random word from a specified word list and send it, with definition if available, to an XMPP (jabber/gtalk) recipient.

Intended to be triggered by a ‘Buddy Pounce’ in Pidgin. For example, when a certain user comes online. Given a large enough list of words, a randomly selected one is usually obscure and fairly entertaining. PUDDENING, for example. The act of becoming a pudding? Perhaps.

Very low

• GNU coreutils
• libpurple-bin
• html2text
• curl