Jeff Mikels | …helping people discover life in Christ.

WordPress Development Behind the Scenes

After doing some research into how to develop a WordPress site in a “staging” area behind the scenes before going public, I have finally stumbled upon an elegant and simple solution:

Using a plugin like simply-static, convert all wordpress-generated data to static html files. Tell nginx to try those files first (unless there is a logged-in user) falling back to the normal wordpress generation when they can’t be found. Now, public viewers will bypass wordpress entirely, grabbing all the static files while you happily do your coding in the background.

Is it Discrimination to Discriminate against Discriminators?

My church office received an email today that called me out for what was printed in the local newspaper reporting on my involvement in the City Council meeting last Monday.

A woman named Kathy wrote this:

Dear Pastor Mikels,

Reading the newspaper Tuesday morning, I felt quite sad to read about your objections to our community protecting the rights of transgendered people and your positioning yourself as one who should judge them. I do not believe discrimination against anyone is right.

My Statement to the Lafayette City Council on Gender Identity

Last night, the Lafayette City Council met to consider putting an amendment into the Lafayette Human Relations Ordinance. Some time ago, the city codified a “Human Relations Ordinance” to fight against discrimination in our town. It created a Human Relations Commission tasked with the job of investigating cases of discrimination in our city and offering suggestions and education to individuals and businesses found to be discriminatory.

Solving MMS Problems on Cricket Wireless

I have an android phone running on the Cricket Wireless network. I followed all their recommended settings, but I still had a major problem. The phone would not send or receive MMS messages when I was connected to Wi-Fi.

PG-13: Benefits of Eliminating Pornography

The views expressed in this video are not my own, but the scientific research is fascinating nonetheless. The video is not explicit, but it is not appropriate for children unless you use it as a teaching tool.

As a pastor, I hear the stories all the time.

The Ethics of Superintelligence

Today, during my lunch, I watched a very interesting TED presentation from Nick Bostrom regarding machine intelligence and the difficult questions surrounding it. What I didn’t realize at the time was that Bostrom is a Philosopher more than an engineer. As a result, his talk ended up being about the ethical questions brought on by the potential of computer superintelligence.

Bash // Create or Attach to Screen Session on Login

I use GNU Screen for everything I do in Linux… perhaps you do too, but perhaps you are annoyed that every time you log in to a terminal session on your Linux machine, you have to go through the one extra step of reconnecting to your screen session or checking to see if one is already running and then maybe creating a new session.

Here’s a way to make sure whenever you SSH into your Linux server, you always get right back where you were in your previous screen session just like you left it. The added bonus of this is that whenever you detach from your screen session, you are also automatically logged out of the server.

Hide Desktop for Distraction Free Writing

Distraction free writing is all the rage these days, and I’m a huge proponent of the movement because I am very prone to distraction. Why right now, I should be doing something else, but I got distracted with this!

Anyway, one of my essential tools for a distraction free environment is a totally black desktop with no icons showing. Each operating system has techniques for making this happen, but I have found a solution that works on all operating systems equally.

I’m Doing the Ice Bucket Challenge this Week

Last week, Ashley Smith issued the “Ice Bucket Challenge” to the LCC Staff, and this Sunday, Billy, Beth, Kevin and I are going to get doused. You will want to be there at around 10:20am to see it happen.

However, I also want to take this opportunity to share a few thoughts about the Ice Bucket Challenge.

A Different Question about Gender Differences

This past week, I tried an experiment.

I posted a couple images to my Facebook timeline that I thought had the potential to become somewhat viral. That is, I thought these images would be shared around Facebook, and I wanted to see how widely they would go.

Why are church people so strange?

Why do church people do . . .

Do the courts define marriage?

Same-sex Marriage is Now the Law of the Land

On June 26, 2014, wlfi.com published an article with this headline:

Same-sex couples wed at Tippecanoe Co. Courthouse

After great amounts of debate earlier this year over the locally infamous HJR-6, a resolution by the two houses of Indiana state government to put a prohibition against same-sex marriage into the state constitution, our legislators decided that one of the phrases in the resolution went too far.

Single Sign-on for Multiple WordPress Installations

Lafayette Community Church uses a couple different WordPress installations for its website.

The first WordPress installation is the main website, and it is located at http://lafayettecc.org/news/.

Transfer an Entire Ubuntu System to a new Drive

After having done this same procedure a number of times, I have finally figured out the best way of transferring an entire Linux System from one drive to another and still have it be bootable.

Step 0: Did you format and partition the drives the way you want?

I write this down just to clarify that I’m assuming you know enough about Linux to have been able to partition and format your new drive the way you want. Furthermore, this guide assumes that your entire root file structure exists on one partition.

Hide/Show Desktop Icons on Mac OSX

I get distracted easily, so I wrote a little script to toggle the visibility of the desktop icons on Mac OSX.

Here it is:

#!/bin/bash

CURRENT=$(defaults read com.apple.