Don't try to round-robin as in

http://code.google.com/p/cia-vc/source/browse/trunk/cia/LibCIA/IRC/Network.py

The reason for this decision is that freenode, the most important
case, says its list of authoritative hosts is not stable and clients
should connect through chat.freenode.org.

echo '{"channel":"irc://freenode.net/cia:223","message":"This is a test of the irker"}' | irker.py

and is ready for the attempt to switch to production.