Went to Best Buy to waste some time and I saw something called Drive+play by harman/kardon... pretty much an ipod radio transmitter on steroids.
I saw them for 20 bucks... couldn't pass it up!
So... I spent a lot of my night taking my dashboard apart and gutting my stereo. I made a lot of mistakes (didn't unhook the battery... blew a fuse that took me an hour to find) and pretty much wired, re-wired, repeated for 3 times.

Now I can say I'm pretty confident how to install stereo stuff... the right way.
the irony of that experience is that it would have probably been so much better if you'd had music playing that entire time...hahah.
You know i had my laptop next to me! haha. I'd have gone crazy!
oh good! the thought of all of that in silence was a concept that literally pained me to think about! haha.