> Be very good at off-the-cuff 80% solutions to topcoder problems on a whiteboard, which I am. So much so, that when they told me to use whatever sort algorithm I wanted to, I used bubblesort on purpose, to prove a point, and got away with it.

You should have gone with bogo sort to really stick it to them :) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogosort)