How do you chose names for your characters?

I used to choose them with great care, using baby namer books and getting just the right meaning. That gets tougher after 22 novels and dozens of novellas and short stories! These days, I just scan names from this site http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/ using the characters birth year to find a popular (or unpopular) name for that time period…one I haven’t used before.

And sometimes, I completely screw up and get overlapping names. In one of my new series, I have a main character named Gabriel. In the other, I have a Gavril. My excuse is that I didn’t write them back to back. By the time i realized the similarity, it was too late—those names were too firmly attached to the characters. My daughter thinks it’s hilarious. She asks if I’ll have a Gavriel next. Yeah, yeah…