soft body verticies paint weight

I am a noob to blender and 3d modeling in general. I downloaded the tutorial on softbodys. In the tutorial he sets the some of the veritcies to weight 1. I do not have an option under the paint menu to adjust the weight, even after I set my editor to weight paint. I have rgb, opacity, gamma, size and a few other options, but not one for weight. Can anyone tell me how to bring up this dialog?

You need to assign a set of verts as a Vertex Group:

http://download.blender.org/documentation/htmlI/PartA/character_animation/gfx/hst_16.png

In F9, Link and Materials tab in Edit Mode you’ll see the above buttons.
Select the verts and press “New” to create a group then “Assign” to assign only the selected verts to it. Then rename that group and set the weight.

http://download.blender.org/documentation/htmlI/x8210.html

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