Where is ember? Or node for that matter?

I am trying to start an ember tutorial. I'd swear I've used node and npm before, but not super recently. I installed with sudo npm install -g ember-cli (doing it as a user got me errors indicating I needed sudo) and didn't see any errors. But ember -v returns nothing. No error, just a new command prompt. Same with node --version. Synaptic says I'm running node version 1.4.21+ds-2(vivid).

What am I missing here? Why can't ember run or return errors?

Note, I'm seeing the same behavior as this question: installing ember-cli on ubuntu. ember new app fails silently

But with the added weirdness that even asking for the version fails.