Prevent vi from opening files for which you do not have read permission

Found an annoying thing in one of the new servers I was playing around. It generated some log files as root and permissions of 600 and others as the designated user. Now the problem is that when I open log files with 600 permission in vi it happily opens up but, shows a blank buffer with 'Permission Denied' error. After a couple of times I got really annoyed and decided to fix it.

Attempt 1: ~/bin is ahead in the path to /usr/bin/vi so, wrote a simple script to check for file permissions.

#!/bin/sh
if [ -e $1 -a ! -r $1 ]; then
  echo No read permission for $1
  exit 1
fi
/usr/bin/vi $1

But, sadly that did not cut it
Attempt 2: Stuffed the above in an alias. I'll leave as an exercise for you to figure out what happens
Attempt 3: Then converted the same logic to a shell function called vi and w00t! it worked :)

vi() {
  if [ -e $1 -a ! -r $1 ]; then
    echo No read permission for $1
  else
    /usr/bin/vi $1
  fi
}