I've earned around $300 from RentACoder when I worked there last month and got the money transferred to my PayPal account (now that PayPal have solved their bug which required international users to have a US back account in order to accept money). I want to spend this money on online shopping, and this means books! Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't work with PayPal (because it belongs to their competitor eBay), so I registered at Barnes & Noble. It is more expensive than Amazon by 15-20% on average, but I don't have much choice.

Today I made the first order - "Lisp in Small Pieces" - it's just the kind of book to buy as a special present to myself. I doubt I would agree to shell out the $80 it costs had I not had the RAC money in PayPal already. For now it looks like the transaction was processed successfully and BN pulled the money from my PayPal account.