So if you're working on a branch, and occassionally want to keep up with
current development on origin/master to continue working, what's the best way to sync up?

I believe albrecht said this one command would do the job
if you run into trouble pushing a branch:

    git pull --rebase

Is that also sufficient to keep an "in progress" branch synced with origin/master?
The net seems to recommend the following for resync'ing an in progress branch:

    git checkout master         -- switch from your branch to master
    git pull                    -- get the latest from the remote. If your local master is clean, this shouldn't fail
    git checkout <local-branch> -- switch back to your branch
    git rebase master           -- rebase your branch to master

..or is that pretty much the same thing that 'git pull --rebase' does while you're
on your branch?