Dean, someone gave me a box of cat5 with that translucent teflon insulation. I used it to wire a friends house for ethernet and phones. It was indeed a pain in the butt, but it worked and it was free.

Paul, I've seen a bunch of OSP in my travels and it all has been solid colors with no tracers. I have a large chunk of something like 300 pair that someone gave me and while I have the binders separated and the pairs grouped at one end, it still gives me a headache to look at it. It's not long enough to do anything with so I keep it just to show off to people.

The real fun stuff is the lead pulp cable. I have a short chunk of that and the paper is white and pink (probably was supposed to be red) and that's all you have. I think I posted a picture of it once. I found it in the basement of the bar I do maintenance for. The building was originally fed with pulp cable but has long since been redone with regular plastic stuff and a fancy 100pr protector/terminal. I'd love to cut out one of the lead splice cases and open it up to get some pictures. There's three or four lead splices down there where they tapped off the main cable to feed terminals.