Friday evening I popped along to the swank St Regis hotel next to SFMOMA in downtown San Francisco, for the annual Wired Rave Awards. I was fashionably late, I think it was about 9.45pm when I arrived.

It's Friday evening, I had dinner with some friends and then popped along to mix and meddle with the Wired crowd. I fully expected to be entering just as the party is hopping. Wired is all about culture and this is their big celebration of what's wired and not tired.

Clearly, everyone was tired because the party had closed at 9pm! I was shocked.

I know that Chris Anderson, the super talented editor of Wired has four kids, and he needs to read stories and run around  and get glasses of water, but...9pm? What about the rest of us that can stay up late... If this was NYC I'd have arrived way too early.

I think Wired should have its next Rave Awards ceremony in San Jose, Santa Clara or even Santa Rosa--9pm on a Friday wouldn't be out of place in those cities.

Although the place was deserted when I got there,  there was a pile of Wired magazines and I took one with me and headed downstairs to the bar. 

As I sipped a manhattan I leafed through the magazine and I was amazed at how many tired topics it had. On the index page is a shot of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Then another two pager photo of a very bronzed Mr Schwarzenegger in the middle of the magazine, almost pullout style.

Here is the front cover of Wired and some more Tired topics such as Harry Potter:

The one redeeming feature was: The Road to Ruin How Grand Theft Auto Hit the Skids. An excellent story about taking the Grand Theft culture into the boardroom. [Let's have a game version!]

Plus: Excellent graphics on Fred Vogelstein's Q&A with Eric Schmidt. BTW, I don't think Mr Schmidt is the best person to Q&A with on the topic of Google... I'd chat with the boys, but they aren't talking, at least not to Wired.