Ok – so my niece Gracie (second one – sister of exceptionally cute but high speed terror Katie) has something called a Ventricular Septal Defect . In short, it means a hole inside your heart, that happens to about 1 out of 100 babies. I can’t tell you how much it sucks that that 1 is my sister’s.

So the idea is that we would wait and see if it maybe healed itself, which they sometimes do. If so, then all is well, and onward we go. If not (and it looks now like this might be the case), she needs surgery to repair it. It’s pretty common (as the number of these cases would bear out), but still – you just don’t want to operate on an infant.

So we have to wait two weeks to find out if surgery is the way to go. Will advise.

Been a developer for going on 22 years, programming everything from TRS-80′s to IBM Mainframes, to mini computers, to Java, to .Net – and everything in between. Today I met my greatest challenge.

My TV remote control.

In all fairness, the MX-500 is truly an incredible device. It will control a ton of devices, and even learns how to support the ones it doesn’t support natively. It has macros, favorites, and will do the most complicated things (like turn on the TV, receiver, DVD player, set the sound properly, and hit play on the DVD) with the push of a single button. It’s just a huge programming job.