With my apologies to Mike Meyer's old Linda Richmond character on Saturday Night Live's Coffee Talk segments, we'd love to have you "talk amongst yourselves."

This month, we're unveiling the new Forums on our redesigned online home, located at www.hydraulicspneumatics.com. Simply click the button on the left side that says "Forums" and you're there. Registering is free and easy, and only required if you would like to post a message or answer someone else's question. Our Forums obviously have a focus on all things fluid power, and they are broken down into several areas:

• editorials and other issues raised in H&P,
• system design and troubleshooting,
• development disasters, and
• general fluid power discussion.

With the development disasters area, we're looking for design blunders that taught you something about engineering in general or fluid power in particular. If we publish your story in the magazine (with your permission, of course), we'll even pay you $50.

In addition to having our editors monitor the forum, post questions, and answer any queries we can, we've asked some of fluid power's brightest stars to help out. Although-you, our readers, are engineers and system-designers, we think it makes sense to have one place where everyone — worldwide — can come together and discuss ideas of interest to those who work with fluid power. And that includes university researchers, employees of fluid power manufacturers and distributors, maintenance personnel, students, system integrators, and consultants.

I hope you'll take a virtual stroll through the Forums soon and register yourself. Post a message and ask a question, relay a fluid power story, talk about your educational experiences, express your frustration, whatever. Maybe you've heard a good joke about engineers or have a design problem that you just can't find a solution for. These Forums are set up expressly for you, and I look forward to meeting up with you there soon.