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Many years ago, I applied for a job at Microsoft, was flown up to the Mountain View campus, and was put through eight hours of infamous Microsoft interview questions. You know the type: brainteasers intended to reveal to the interviewer how I solve problems. Most of the questions were standard riddles, like, How do you match up three light switches in one room to each of the three light bulbs that they control in another room while making as few trips as possible between rooms? (Hint: there’s a way to do it in one trip.)

But one question, toward the end of the day, caught me off guard. The interviewer asked, “Why do the drainpipes of sinks have P-traps on them?” (P-traps are that curve in the pipe under the sink.)

At the time, I thought it a pretty strange and irrelevant question. (Yes, more so than the one about the ratio of blue paint to red paint in two buckets where the same spoon has been dipped into the red one and then the blue one and then back into the red one.) After all, why would someone applying for a job at Microsoft need to know how the plumbing under a sink works?

If I remember correctly, I figured that since the trap often gets clogged — like the time I tried to put a whole colander of old spaghetti down the garbage disposal — the trap must be for, well, trapping chunks of food before it gets into the sewer system. Not quite, the interviewer explained. Turns out that getting clogged is actually an unwanted side effect of the P-trap. Its real function is to stay full of water so that sewer gases don’t come back up into the house.

I didn’t get the job — not just because I didn’t know what a P-trap is for, but also because I wasn’t much for brainteasers back then, or perhaps because I generally wasn’t all that bright at the time. But anyway, for the most part, I soon forgot about the seemingly silly P-trap question.

It wasn’t until not too long ago, when G and I bought our house, and when I suddenly realized that I really like do-it-yourself projects — and suddenly found myself fixing leaking drains and pulling toilets off their bases and rigging washing machines so as not to overflow — that I remembered the P-trap question again. And it was then that I finally understood what an interviewer could gain from asking such a question.

See, if I were to answer the question incorrectly, as I had, then it would be no big deal: the interviewer could assume that I simply had lived in apartments and dorms for a long time and never had to deal with plumbing. However, if I were to answer correctly, then the interviewer could immediately imply a handful of things about me — like that I had at some point fixed a sink myself, and therefore had had to teach myself a new skill in a limited amount of time, and that I was the type of person who would do it himself rather than wait for a plumber to show up (and that I probably could have waited for that plumber but was just too cheap to want to pay one.)

In other words, the interviewer could find out if I was a do-it-yourselfer. And in doing so, they’d find out quite a bit about my personality.

It’s clear to me now why I like meeting other do-it-yourselfers so much. Sure, we share a hobby in common. But also, I can be pretty sure that they’re self-reliant people. They believe they can learn new things. They like to learn new things. They like to solve problems. They like to make things better. Sounds like the perfect qualities to look for in a new hire.

If I’m ever interviewing you and you want to impress me, find a way to tell me about how you spent the past weekend tiling your kitchen floor.

Marc Andreessen blogged recently about brainstorming, pointing to research quoted in the The Medici Effect that states that groups that get together to brainstorm consistently underperform groups that split up and brainstorm ideas individually and then come back together later to share those ideas.

It’s an interesting insight, and I’ve certainly had my share of meetings where I’ve just wanted to go away and think quietly for a while. But I’d say the bigger problem facing most companies is not generating ideas, but rather knowing when to stop brainstorming and start doing.

I think this is especially a problem in the tech industry, where it’s easy to talk about all the cool things you could do with a product. Over and over again, I’ve seen teams come together to solve a problem and walk away with a half dozen other projects to think about, each with their own problems.

One organization I worked for called a meeting to discuss what should have been a fairly simple request to modify a checkbox on its Web site. They wanted the box to be pre-checked when users first saw it, in hopes that it might raise subscription rates to their e-newsletter. Sounds like something that probably could have been handled over email or in a phone call? Nope. The meeting lasted an hour, with six people representing a variety of different departments and levels in attendance. By the end of the meeting, the original reason for “checking the checkbox” had long been forgotten and replaced with eight new “wouldn’t it be great if” ideas. And the associate who had initially been asked to make the change was left sitting at the table wondering aloud if she was still supposed to make the change or not. Awesome.

Organizations like these aren’t stagnant behemoths in need of new processes to tease out the next brilliant idea. They’re teeming with ideas — and no ability to focus on just some of them. What they need is not someone to say, “Hey, let’s change the way we brainstorm” but rather “Hey, we’re past the brainstorming phase on this one and into the decision-making phase.”

I’m pretty tough on products that have bad user interfaces, especially technical products. For instance, within three weeks of getting a Comcast (Motorola) DVR, I gave everyone who spent more than two minutes with me a treatise on just how much more I preferred TiVo’s interface. All I’m trying to do is watch TV for crying out loud, so why does Comcast think my remote control needs to look like a graphing calculator?

But the one interface I’ve always hated doesn’t have much to do with technology — or high technology, at least. It’s the Dewey Decimal System. While it’s great to have industry standards, there’s no reason to force end users to know the ins and outs of those standards to benefit from them — which is exactly what librarians have done for over a century. Looking for books about technology? Look for the 600 on the spine!

So I have to say it’s about time a library bucked tradition and started organizing books under plain-English headings and printing plain-English subjects on the spines.

It reminds me of one of my favorite stories about another type of usable “interface”: that of the footpaths at the University of Oregon, which were paved after paths naturally appeared in the grass where student and faculty walked the most.

I’ve been meaning to post this for quite a while: In January, my friend Ben launched Virtually Blind, a blog covering the “justice, law, and politics of virtual worlds.” You might not think there’d be a whole lot to say here, or that it’d tend to be a pretty dry topic, but Ben’s been on a roll since he started, posting all sorts of well-thought out (and witty) insights into how the law affects technology and vice versa.

UniversalGiving looks interesting: It’s a charity site that lets you select exactly what project or gift package you want your money to go toward.

For instance, if healthcare in developing nations is a cause you’re particularly interested in funding, you can donate $50 to “provide a birth kit to a Tibetan woman and her unborn child.” And UniversalGiving says they don’t take a cut of your donation.

Reminds me of Kiva, but with a focus on helping you find and fund the what instead of the who.

I’ve started moderating the incoming comments on this blog — yes, yes, all three that I get each year, I get it, you’re funny — because I wasn’t able to delete all the comment spam fast enough. So this means I now have to scan through a long list of recently posted comments whenever I get a spare moment every few days and look for comments that I want to approve. And in doing so, I’ve noticed something kind of odd: Apparently, I’ve got a spammer who feels bad about filling up my blog with comments that link to all sorts of shady Web sites that sell questionable pharmaceuticals.

How do I know he (or she) feels bad about spamming my site? Check out the sort of notes he’s leaving next to all the shady links:

• “Sorry that I did that”
• “Deeply sorry for that”
• “Really sorry for this”
• “Please don’t be angry”
• “Please forgive me”

I just helped finance two small businesses in Uganda and Kenya. I say this not to brag, but rather to point out what an incredible idea Kiva is. The organization uses the Web to connect individuals who would like to put their spare cash to good use with business owners in developing nations who need “microloans” — loans so small that most banks won’t bother.

In reality, the system is connecting you to a microfinance institution that vets and works with the business owners. But by taking care of that behind the scenes and bringing the business owners themselves to the forefront, Kiva’s rewriting the way microfinance works. After all, when you decide to put some money toward a good cause, wouldn’t you rather know exacly who it’s helping, as opposed to seeing it go into some large, nameless account somewhere?

Oh, and another great thing about Kiva: they encourage participants to tell others about their loans. (Forget the days of giving silently — the more people who contribute, the better chance these businesses have of getting off the ground.)

And Kiva makes it stupid simple, too. When you make a loan, they give you a single snippet of HTML code that you can plug into your own blog or Web site. The result? The promo box you see at the beginning of this post.

By itself, this story — about a 74-year-old woman whose personalized license plate (NWTF) was rejected because some DMV employees think NWTF refers to a bit of Internet shorthand (wtf) — is already perfect.

But the fact that it also includes the following quote takes the story to a level where it quite possibly will win the award for being the defining story of the Internet era:

“Apparently, the young people use it on the computer,” she said.

Yes, apparently they do.

That’s the sort of line a reporter could spend his entire life just waiting to hear.

The latest issue of the New Yorker has an article about citizen journalism and discusses, in part, OhmyNews — the organization that hosted me at the International Citizen Reporters’ Forum in Seoul last month. I haven’t quite yet decided what I think about the article, except that:

1. it was surprisingly unfocused and dull for a New Yorker piece; and
2. I can’t figure out why the copy editors decided to refer to the organization as “Oh My News” when its official name is clearly OhmyNews.

The “Oh” in OhmyNews, by the way, is a reference to the founder’s name, Oh Yeon Ho, and not to the English expression “Oh My”. (In case you were wondering.)

Sorry to get all techie-pedantic on you, dear readers, but I’ve just got to get this off my chest: People, a podcast is not synonymous with any old audio file you put up on your Web site. A podcast is what you get when you actually distribute your audio file automatically to subscribers using RSS or some other syndication method.

Phew. Thanks. Geek levels falling back to normal levels now.