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Saturday, January 2, 2016


Posted by Doug Powell on 12/29/2015 from Barfblog

      Today, I am 53-years-old, been married to Amy for nine years, and it’s my mom’s birthday.

That’s a lot for one day.

I’ve been looking back, only with an eye to going forward (that’s the lab in Guelph, about early 2005, right).

Three years ago, about this time, I submitted a proposal to my employer, Kansas State University, to take a 20 per cent cut in pay, develop a MOOC in food safety risk analysis (and three other courses), and continue with research and outreach.

I also wrote that “I have promoted K-State and collaborations throughout many countries, particularly New Zealand, Australia, Canada, France, UK, Egypt and Afghanistan. Regarding the latter, I have provided several food safety training sessions for the U.S. military for troops being deployed to that region. Through the bites-l listserv, barfblog.com and media coverage, I have attracted significant attention to the food safety activities at Kansas State University."

The bosses at Kansas State University determined I had to be on campus, so I was dumped.

Full professors can get dumped for bad attendance.

Like a breakup with someone you really loved, it was messy and takes time, about three years.

But I’m over it.

Irony being ironic, or karma being karma-like, the Manhattan (Kansas) paper re-ran a story today, my birthday and anniversary and my mom's birthday, from the
Topeka paper about my global activities, billing me as a former and retired K-State prof.

I’m not dead yet.

It’s a wonder of the electronic world that journalists from anywhere can find me, but a university that aspires to – something – can’t.
barfblog.com now consists of about 11,580 posts and 60,100 subscribers in over 70 countries. Chapman refers to barfblog.com as a repository of food safety stories.

I like that.

barfblog daily has 4,855 subscribers in over 70 countries.

The barfblog twitter feed has 3,601 subscribers, and Chapman has a bunch more.

In October, website analytics showed that
barfblog.com was visited 573,000 so far in 2015, by 413,000 unique users resulting in over 813,000 page views. This represents a 6% increase in visits, 4% increase in visitors and 6% increase in page views over last year.

Chapman also produced and posted 14 Food Safety Talk (
www.foodsafetytalk.com
) Podcasts during this past year

Food Safety Talk podcasts have been downloaded over 4300 times in the past year (with an average download rate of 340 per episode).

I love what I do, and I love that Amy kicked me out of complacency – nothing would have been easier than to stay at K-State.

And she’s got me playing hockey again, just like she said she would in our self-written wedding vows at City Hall.

In Manhattan (Kansas).
     
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Copyright © 2015 Doug Powell and Ben Chapman
Dr. Douglas Powellpowellfoodsafety.com
barfblog.com
Google voice: 1-785-289-8165
skype: dpowell29
0478 222 221
dpowell29@gmail.com
I am based in Brisbane, Australia, which is 14 hours ahead of U.S. EST


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