sendTransaction and events not working in NodeJS app

Question

I have a contract deployed on the testnet, I can do the following within geth: reference.transfer.sendTransaction(bob, 467, {from:me})

However I can't do this within my node console (with web3 etc. all loaded), as I receive the following error:

reference.transfer.sendTransaction(bob, 246, {from: me, gas:200000}) 
Error: Transaction not confirmed
at Object.module.exports.InvalidResponse (/Users/jbowkett/node_modules/web3/lib/web3/errors.js:35:16)
at RequestManager.send (/Users/jbowkett/node_modules/web3/lib/web3/requestmanager.js:61:22)
at Eth.send [as sendTransaction] (/Users/jbowkett/node_modules/web3/lib/web3/method.js:145:58)
at SolidityFunction.sendTransaction (/Users/jbowkett/node_modules/web3/lib/web3/function.js:133:26)
at repl:1:20
at REPLServer.defaultEval (repl.js:252:27)
at bound (domain.js:287:14)
at REPLServer.runBound [as eval] (domain.js:300:12)
at REPLServer.<anonymous> (repl.js:417:12)
at emitOne (events.js:82:20)
at REPLServer.emit (events.js:169:7)

Also, my events on transfer fire in geth, but I can't see if they will fire within my node app, because of the above error.

I need the node app to receive events because I want to make external calls to other node apis.