Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

So I had my first big failure with the Air this week. A couple of days ago, I tried to connect to the file server at the hizzy and got a kernel panic. Honestly, the issues I have had with network drives and Leopard *cough*crap*cough* this seemed like par for the course. I hard powered it and waited, login and PANIC!. Fuck. Next I hard powered it and right after POST, it just shut back down. This went into a complete loop and it was bricked for a few days.

I got into the Apple store today (ATLiens: go to Lenox. The Genius bar at Perimeter is staffed by jackasses). My Genius went through the same round of stuff I went through, though I couldn't book off my non-MBA specific external optical. He got it to boot, but the Apple equiv of fsck wouldn't un-fsck my flash drive, so he did a binary erase and started a reinstall. Short version: at least I didn't have to send it off for a week. Long version: seems like recovery on the SSD is pretty much a non-option. I am considering paying the apple tax for a "Time Capsule" after this one. I lost several days worth of work and have been crippled for a couple days.