In this great story from the Telegraph our protagonist, Flight Leutennant Ball, didn't blindly obey the order from his commanding officer to trim his moustache. In true British fighting spirit, he 

decided to go above the head of his superior officer and consulted regulations approved by the Queen which set out the permitted size of an RAF moustache.

And made it stick! That's cool.

It's not as easy as you might think.

Firstly, the official vmware tools won't install on kernel versions 2.6.24. Fortunately you can get some simple source patches from http://projects.tuxx-home.at/?id=vmware_updates

Once you've got the modules installed, if you're beady eyed (or analy retentive) you will notice that the network interface is still using the legacy pcnet32 emulation. You see the vmware tools has tried to create a /etc/modules.conf file to configure the hardware, but Ubuntu shed that file a long time ago in favour of modules.d.

You have two simple solutions from what I can see - either edit your .vmx file (the config file on your host machine) by adding the following line:

ethernet0.virtualDev = "vmxnet" 

Or else you can force the kernel to never load the pcnet32 module:

echo "blacklist pcnet32" >> /etc/modules.d/blacklist
modprobe -r pcnet32
update-initramfs -u

Easiest thing to do after that is reboot. You might notice your interface gets loaded as eth1 instead of eth0 (and thus not be configured). This is because vmware may have assigned your new interface a new mac address. Simply delete the ethernet interface lines from /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and then:

/etc/init.d/udev restart

Again a restart at this point is simplest.

Well now he has re-invented himself, and is hoping to help you do the same.

Find what you love and everything else will fall into place

I really encourage you to check out his first online exercise, Heroes.

... we notice the things [in our heroes] that we ourselves are ...