Yep I most definitely have the alarm system as well. they go hand-in-hand in my mind so I thought they'd be the same unit.
I have thought about the whole stock look thing. I was driving around a little today with the new hu indash but not hooked up and i was getting some glare (the light was coming through my sun roof, which i can just close the cover when that happens). I have the Alpine changer mounted under my passenger seat and the main reason i want to change it is b/c its a pain in the ass to change cds. My ultimate plan is to replace it with a sony mp3 10 disc changer so I can load mp3 discs in the changer and just forget about it, then stick my audio cds in the dash.

looking at the back of the stock head it has 3 extra pins that aren't on the harness I bought. The more I think about it I might just go to a junk yard and rip the harness out of an old one and splice wires to it

any suggestions for attaching wires to pins without using a harness?