Smajdalf:
Use red LED instead of the IR one - is it blinking? If not the pin is not driven.
Look at the IR LED via cell phone camera. It should be blinking blue (cameras see IR as blue).BTW you may need to configure the pin as OUTPUT. Maybe the library does it for you, maybe not.
Thanks for your time on this. I did both of these things and the red led isn't blinking, so I'm kind of lost. I can swap out this sketch for blink configured to pin 3 and it blinks fine, so it seems to be a software problem...but this is the default sketch everyone uses, so again...I'm lost.