I’m as happy as a squirrel with three nuts! Look at this huge bag of resistors that I got at the last Electronic Flea Market for just two dollars.
As with many things in life, a bonanza is usually paired with a burden. In this case, I had to sort out the contents of the bag. Not easy at all. I spent hours, and only got through a fraction of it. One of the problems is, the resistors don’t have numbers on them, they have color coded bands. Most of them have a band that is either black, brown, or gold (which turns up as a dark bronze color). A real nightmare to distinguish between these three.
On the bright side, the bag also contained ceramic capacitors, regular diodes, zener diodes, and schottky diodes. The zeners and schottkys are worth at least a dime apiece (a dollar if you got them from Radio Shack). When I worked at HP labs, we regularly swept this kind of stuff into the trash. Why? Because it isn’t worth an engineer’s time to sort it out. The only person who might want to sort it is someone whose time isn’t worth a lot of money. That was me when I was a teenager, and that’s me now, as a retiree. In a way, I’ve come full circle.
