Regarding your remote: Go into the For Sale forum and put up a post asking if anyone has any remotes for sale. There are two remotes that work by default.

Also: If you have an old IR remote lying around that you're not using for anything else, I think it's possible to do some tricks to the player that will let it recognize that remote. They don't involve programming, but they do involve installing the hijack kernel, calling up its IR codes menu, pushing buttons on the remote and writing down the codes you see, then editing the config file on the player by adding an ir_translate section to it that will accept the remote's codes.

At least I think that's do-able. Haven't tried it myself actually. But I'll bet we folks here on the BBS could coach you through it. Or just maybe those links I gave you would be enough?