I had just done a college essay on Michael Faraday, and he was a pretty cool scientist/engineer. Seemed fitting for my first staff coder bit.

For PCs, I tend to just use names that I like, since I'm going to have to constantly be typing and seeing them. Occasionally I'll come up with a unique one special to a setting/etc. (on The 100, for instance, they used variants of local place names/signs), but mostly I just rotate ones from my 'stable' of names.