Ok, so just to add to this, there is no problem plotting when I used the following command in my terminal to start the notebook:
ipython notebook
The only problem is that this plots my figures outside of the notebook page, and I really want to get everything into the notebook, since that's the point of the install.
but for some reason when I add the --pylab=inline that all the tutorials mention I get the AttributeError I mentioned before. I'm starting to wonder if this is a problem with my machine setup, if I'm missing something else that ipython notebook needs to do inline plotting.
Any help on this would be appreciated -- at this point I'm banging my head against the wall and solution doesn't seem to have surfaced through googling.