Doing a quick Google search I see this is now considered a convention rather than a rule and interestingly I notice that my grammar checker wants to change the two instances of "an" above to "a".
The language as we learned it has changed significantly and the world wide media certainly aids in that unwanted endeavor.
The pronunciation of words beginning with the letter E get changed to an UH sound, and the list goes on ad-infinitum.
Railing against such hacking of the language is like Don Quixote tilting at windmills, which is what I feel like most of the time:)
