So... while I respect avoiding shameless self-promotion, referencing your hobby project, or at least including it in your "About" info would be cool, for those interested. :)
Looked up effnet stats the other day to find out there's only 20k users there these days. Not sure how many it was back in the day, and I was more of an undernet guy... but seems small today.
Contact details are in my profile... we can reminisce via email (which is effectively going the way of the Old Internet, especially as the millennials take over).
If you want to work for Microsoft or Google, while you likely can't get away with using your employers's $2K, the best books to read are Cracking the Coding Interview and Elements of Programming Interviews. Both books have very solid algorithm questions which you can use to go research the various algorithms and learn them. Although, I'd wait for Elements of Programming Interviews v2 which will include Java samples, as opposed to C++, but that's just me.
McDowell's The Google Resume also has some useful tidbits in it.